Beautiful Darkness

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For Sarah Burnes, Julie Scheina, and Jennifer Bailey Hunt because for some silly reason they wouldn't let us put their names on the cover.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. --PLATO

BEFORE

Caster Girl

I used to think our town, buried in the South Carolina backwoods, stuck in the muddy bottom of the Santee River valley, was the middle of nowhere. A place where nothing ever happened and nothing would ever change. Just like yesterday, the unblinking sun would rise and set over the town of Gatlin without bothering to kick up so much as a breeze. Tomorrow my neighbors would be rocking on their porches, heat and gossip and familiarity melting like ice cubes into their sweet tea, as they had for more than a hundred years. Around here, our traditions were so traditional it was hard to put a finger on them. They were woven into everything we did or, more often, didn't do. You could be born or married or buried, and the Methodists kept right on singing. Sundays were for church, Mondays for doing the marketing at the Stop & Shop, the only grocery store in town. The rest of the week involved a whole lot of nothing and a little more pie, if you were lucky enough to live with someone like my family's housekeeper, Amma, who won the bake-off at the county fair every year. Old four-fingered Miss Monroe still taught cotillion, one empty finger of her white-gloved hand flapping as she sashayed down the dance floor with the debutantes. Maybelline Sutter was still cutting hair at the Snip 'n' Curl, though she had lost most of her eyesight around the same time she turned seventy, and now she forgot to put the guard down on the clippers half the time, shearing a skunk stripe up the back of your head. Carlton Eaton never failed, rain or shine, to open your mail before he delivered it. If the news was bad, he would break it to you himself. Better to hear it from one of your own. This town owned us, that was the good and the bad of it. It knew every inch of us, every sin, every secret, every scab. Which was why most people never bothered to leave, and why the ones who did never came back. Before I met Lena that would have been me, five minutes after I graduated from Jackson High. Gone. Then I fell in love with a Caster girl. She showed me there was another world within the cracks of our uneven sidewalks. One that had been there all along, hidden in plain sight. Lena's Gatlin was a place where things happened -- impossible, supernatural, life-altering things. Sometimes life-ending. While regular folks were busy cutting back their rosebushes or picking past worm-eaten peaches at the roadside stand, Light and Dark Casters with unique and powerful gifts were locked in an eternal struggle -- a supernatural civil war without any hope of a white flag waving. Lena's Gatlin was home to Demons and danger and a curse that had marked her family for more than a hundred years. And the closer I got to Lena, the closer her Gatlin came to mine. A few months ago, I believed nothing would ever change in this town. Now I knew better, and I only wished it was true. Because the second I fell in love with a Caster girl, no one I loved was safe. Lena thought she was the only one cursed, but she was wrong. It was our curse now.

2.15

Perpetual Peace

The rain dripping off the brim of Amma's best black hat. Lena's bare knees hitting the thick mud in front of the grave. The pinpricks on the back of my neck that came from standing too close to so many of Macon's kind. Incubuses -- Demons who fed off the memories and dreams of Mortals, like me, as we slept. The sound they made, unlike anything else in the universe, when they ripped open the last bit of dark sky and disappeared just before dawn. As if they were a pack of black crows, taking off from a power line in perfect unison. That was Macon's funeral. I could remember the details as if it had happened yesterday, even though it was hard to believe some of it had happened at all. Funerals were tricky like that. And life, I guess. The important parts you blocked out altogether, but the random, slanted moments haunted you, replaying over and over in your mind. What I could remember: Amma waking me up in the dark to get to His Garden of Perpetual Peace before dawn. Lena frozen and shattered, wanting to freeze and shatter everything around her. Darkness in the sky and in half the people standing around the grave, the ones who weren't people at all. But behind all that, there was something I couldn't remember. It was there, lingering in the back of my mind. I had been trying to think of it since Lena's birthday, her Sixteenth Moon, the night Macon died. The only thing I knew was that it was something I needed to remember. The morning of the funeral it was pitch-black outside, but patches of moonlight were shining through the clouds into my open window. My room was freezing, and I didn't care. I had left my window open the last two nights since Macon died, like he might just show up in my room and sit down in my swivel chair and stay awhile. I remembered the night I saw him standing by my window, in the dark. That's when I found out what he was. Not a vampire or some mythological creature from a book, as I had suspected, but a real Demon. One who could have chosen to feed on blood, but chose my dreams instead. Macon Melchizedek Ravenwood. To the folks around here, he was Old Man Ravenwood, the town recluse. He was also Lena's uncle, and the only father she had ever known. I was getting dressed in the dark when I felt the warm pull from inside that meant Lena was there.

L? Lena spoke up from the depths of my mind, as close as anyone could be and about as far away. Kelting, our unspoken form of communication. The whispering language Casters like her had shared long before my bedroom had been declared south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was the secret language of intimacy and necessity, born in a time when being different could get you burned at the stake. It was a language we shouldn't have been able to share, because I was a Mortal. But for some inexplicable reason we could, and it was the language we used to speak the unspoken and the unspeakable.

I can't do this. I'm not going. I gave up on my tie and sat back down on my bed, the ancient mattress springs crying out beneath me.

You have to go. You won't forgive yourself if you don't. For a second, she didn't respond.

You don't know how it feels. I do. I remembered when I was the one sitting on my bed afraid to get up, afraid to put on my suit and join the prayer circle and sing Abide With Me and ride in the grim parade of headlights through town to the cemetery to bury my mother. I was afraid it would make it real. I couldn't stand to think about it, but I opened my mind and showed Lena....

You can't go, but you don't have a choice, because Amma puts her hand on your arm and leads you into the car, into the pew, into the pity parade. Even though it hurts to move, like your whole body aches from some kind of fever. Your eyes stop on the mumbling faces in front of you, but you can't actually hear what anyone is saying. Not over the screaming in your head. So you let them put their hand on your arm, you get in the car, and it happens. Because you can make it through this if someone says you can. I put my head in my hands.

Ethan -I'm saying you can, L. I shoved my fists into my eyes, and they were wet. I flipped on my light and stared at the bare bulb, refusing to blink until I seared away the tears.

Ethan, I'm scared. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. There weren't any more words as I went back to fumbling with my tie, but I could feel Lena there, as if she was sitting in the corner of my room. The house seemed empty with my father gone, and I heard Amma in the hall. A second later, she was standing quietly in the doorway clutching her good purse. Her dark eyes searched mine, and her tiny frame seemed tall, though she didn't even reach my shoulder. She was the grandmother I never had, and the only mother I had left now. I stared at the empty chair next to my window, where she had laid out my good suit a little less than a year ago, then back into the bare lightbulb of my bedside lamp. Amma held out her hand, and I handed her my tie. Sometimes it felt like Lena wasn't the only one who could read my mind. I offered Amma my arm as we made our way up the muddy hill to His Garden of Perpetual Peace. The sky was dark, and the rain started before we reached the top of the rise. Amma was in her most respectable funeral dress, with a wide hat that shielded most of her face from the rain, except for the bit of white lace collar escaping beneath the brim. It was fastened at the neck with her best cameo, a sign of respect. I had seen it all last April, just as I had felt her good gloves on my arm, supporting me up this hill once before. This time I couldn't tell which one of us was doing the supporting. I still wasn't sure why Macon wanted to be buried in the Gatlin cemetery, considering the way folks in this town felt about him. But according to Gramma, Lena's grandmother, Macon left strict instructions specifically requesting to be buried here. He purchased the plot himself, years ago. Lena's family hadn't seemed happy about it, but Gramma had put her foot down. They were going to respect his wishes, like any good Southern family.

Lena? I'm here. I know. I could feel my voice calming her, as if I had wrapped my arms around her. I looked up the hill, where the awning for the graveside service would be. It would look the same as any other Gatlin funeral, which was ironic, considering it was Macon's. It wasn't yet daylight, and I could barely make out a few shapes in the distance. They were all crooked, all different. The ancient, uneven rows of tiny headstones standing at the graves of children, the overgrown family crypts, the crumbling white obelisks honoring fallen Confederate soldiers, marked with small brass crosses. Even General Jubal A. Early, whose statue watched over the General's Green in the center of town, was buried here. We made our way around the family plot of a few lesser-known Moultries, which had been there for so long the smooth magnolia trunk at the edge of the plot had grown into the side of the tallest stone marker, making them indistinguishable. And sacred. They were all sacred, which meant we had reached the oldest part of the graveyard. I knew from my mother, the first word carved into any old headstone in Gatlin was Sacred. But as we got closer and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I knew where the muddy gravel path was leading. I remembered where it passed the stone memorial bench at the grassy slope, dotted with magnolias. I remembered my father sitting on that bench, unable to speak or move. My feet wouldn't go any farther, because they had figured out the same thing I had. Macon's Garden of Perpetual Peace was only a magnolia away from my mother's.

The twisting roads run straight between us. It was a sappy line from an even sappier poem I had written Lena for Valentine's Day. But here in the graveyard, it was true. Who would have thought our parents, or the closest thing Lena had to one, would be neighbors in the grave? Amma took my hand, leading me to Macon's massive plot. "Steady now." We stepped inside the waist-high black railing around his gravesite, which in Gatlin was reserved for the perimeters of only the best plots, like a white picket fence for the dead. Sometimes it actually was a white picket fence. This one was wrought iron, the crooked door shoved open into the overgrown grass. Macon's plot seemed to carry with it an atmosphere of its own, like Macon himself. Inside the railing stood Lena's family: Gramma, Aunt Del, Uncle Barclay, Reece, Ryan, and Macon's mother, Arelia, under the black canopy on one side of the carved black casket. On the other side, a group of men and a woman in a long black coat kept their distance from both the casket and the canopy, standing shoulder to shoulder in the rain. They were all bone-dry. It was like a church wedding split by an aisle down the middle, where the relatives of the bride line up opposite the relatives of the groom like two warring clans. There was an old man at one end of the casket, standing next to Lena. Amma and I stood at the other end, just inside the canopy. Amma's grip on my arm tightened, and she pulled the gold charm she always wore out from underneath her blouse and rubbed it between her fingers. Amma was more than superstitious. She was a Seer, from generations of women who read tarot cards and communed with spirits, and Amma had a charm or a doll for everything. This one was for protection. I stared at the Incubuses in front of us, the rain running off their shoulders without leaving a trace. I hoped they were the kind that only fed on dreams. I tried to look away, but it wasn't easy. There was something about an Incubus that drew you in like a spider's web, like any good predator. In the dark, you couldn't see their black eyes, and they almost looked like a bunch of regular guys. A few of them were dressed the way Macon always had, dark suits and expensive-looking overcoats. One or two looked more like construction workers on their way to get a beer after work, in jeans and work boots, their hands shoved in the pockets of their jackets. The woman was probably a Succubus. I had read about them, mostly in comics, and I thought they were just old wives' tales, like werewolves. But I knew I was wrong because she was standing in the rain, dry as the rest of them. The Incubuses were a sharp contrast to Lena's family, cloaked in iridescent black fabric that caught what little light there was and refracted it, as if they were the source themselves. I had never seen them like this before. It was a strange sight, especially considering the strict dress code for women at Southern funerals. In the center of it all was Lena. The way she looked was the opposite of magical. She stood in front of the casket with her fingers quietly resting upon it, as if Macon was somehow holding her hand. She was dressed in the same shimmering material as the rest of her family, but it hung on her like a shadow. Her black hair was twisted into a tight knot, not a trademark curl in sight. She looked broken and out of place, like she was standing on the wrong side of the aisle. Like she belonged with Macon's other family, standing in the rain.

Lena? She lifted her head, and her eyes met mine. Since her birthday, when one of her eyes had turned a shade of gold while the other remained deep green, the colors had combined to create a shade unlike anything I'd ever seen. Almost hazel at times, and unnaturally golden at others. Now they looked more hazel, dull and pained. I couldn't stand it. I wanted to pick her up and carry her away.

I can get the Volvo, and we can drive down the coast all the way to Savannah. We can hide out at my Aunt Caroline's. I took another step closer to her. Her family was crowded around the casket, and I couldn't get to Lena without walking past the line of Incubuses, but I didn't care.

Ethan, stop! It's not safe -A tall Incubus with a scar running down the length of his face, like the mark of a savage animal attack, turned his head to look at me. The air seemed to ripple through the space between us, like I had chucked a stone into a lake. It hit me, knocking the wind out of my lungs as if I'd been punched, but I couldn't react because I felt paralyzed -- my limbs numb and useless.

Ethan! Amma's eyes narrowed, but before she could take a step the Succubus put her hand on Scarface's shoulder and squeezed it, almost imperceptibly. Instantly, I was released from his hold, and the blood rushed back into my limbs. Amma gave her a grateful nod, but the woman with the long hair and the longer coat ignored her, disappearing back into line with the rest of them. The Incubus with the brutal scar turned and winked at me. I got the message, even without the words. See you in your dreams. I was still holding my breath when a white-haired gentleman, in an old-fashioned suit and string tie, stepped up to the coffin. His eyes were a dark contrast to his hair, which made him seem like some creepy character from an old black and white movie.

"The Gravecaster," Amma whispered. He looked more like the gravedigger. He touched the smooth black wood, and a carved crest on the top of the coffin began to glow with a golden light. It looked like some old coat of arms, the kind of thing you saw at a museum or in a castle. I saw a tree with great spreading boughs, and a bird. Beneath it there was a carved sun, and a crescent moon. "Macon Ravenwood of the House of Ravenwood, of Raven and Oak, Air and Earth. Darkness and Light." He took his hand from the coffin, and the light followed, leaving the casket dark again. "Is that Macon?" I whispered to Amma. "The light's symbolic. There's nothin' in that box. Wasn't anythin' left to bury. That's the way with Macon's kind -- ashes to ashes and dust to dust, like us. Just a whole lot quicker." The Gravecaster's voice rose up again. "Who consecrates this soul into the Otherworld?" Lena's family stepped forward. "We do," they said in unison, everyone except Lena. She stood there staring down at the dirt. "As do we." The Incubuses moved closer to the casket. "Then let him be Cast to the world beyond. Redi in pace, ad Ignem Atrum ex quo venisti." The Gravecaster held the light high over his head, and it flared brighter. "Go in peace, back to the Dark Fire from where you came." He threw the light into the air, and sparks showered down onto the coffin, searing into the wood where they fell. As if on cue, Lena's family and the Incubuses threw their hands into the air, releasing tiny silver objects not much bigger than quarters, which rained down onto Macon's coffin amidst the gold flames. The sky was starting to change color, from the black of night to the blue before the sunrise. I strained to see what the objects were, but it was too dark. "His dictis, solutus est. With these words, he is free." An almost blinding white light emanated from the casket. I could barely see the Gravecaster a few feet in front of me, as if his voice was transporting us and we were no longer standing over a gravesite in Gatlin.

Uncle Macon! No! The light flashed, like lightning striking, and died out. We were all back in the circle, looking at a mound of dirt and flowers. The burial was over. The coffin was gone. Aunt Del put her arms protectively around Reece and Ryan. Macon was gone. Lena fell forward onto her knees in the muddy grass. The gate around Macon's plot slammed shut behind her, without so much as a finger touching it. This wasn't over for her. No one was going anywhere.

Lena? The rain started to pick up almost immediately, the weather still tethered to her powers as a Natural, the ultimate elemental in the Caster world. She pulled herself to her feet.

Lena! This isn't going to change anything! The air filled with hundreds of cheap white carnations and plastic flowers and palmetto fronds and flags from every grave visited in the last month, all flying loose in the air, tumbling airborne down the hill. Fifty years from now, folks in town would still be talking about the day the wind almost blew down every magnolia in His Garden of Perpetual Peace. The gale came on so fierce and fast, it was a slap in the face to everyone there, a hit so hard you had to stagger to stay on your feet. Only Lena stood straight and tall, holding fast to the stone marker next to her. Her hair had unraveled from its awkward knot and whipped in the air around her. She was no longer all darkness and shadow. She was the opposite -the one bright spot in the storm, as if the yellowish-gold lightning splitting the sky above us was emanating from her body. Boo Radley, Macon's dog, whimpered and flattened his ears at Lena's feet.

He wouldn't want this, L. Lena put her face in her hands, and a sudden gust blew the canopy out from where it was staked in the wet earth, sending it tumbling backward down the hill. Gramma stepped in front of Lena, closed her eyes, and touched a single finger to her granddaughter's cheek. The moment she touched Lena, everything stopped, and I knew Gramma had used her abilities as an Empath to absorb Lena's powers temporarily. But she couldn't absorb Lena's anger. None of us were strong enough to do that. The wind died down, and the rain slowed to a drizzle. Gramma pulled her hand away from Lena and opened her eyes. The Succubus, looking unusually disheveled, stared up at the sky. "It's almost sunrise." The sun was beginning to burn its way up through the clouds and over the horizon, scattering odd splinters of light and life across the uneven rows of headstones. Nothing else had to be said. The Incubuses started to dematerialize, the sound of suction filling the air. Ripping was how I thought of it, the way they pulled open the sky and disappeared. I started to walk toward Lena, but Amma yanked my arm. "What? They're gone." "Not all a them. Look --" She was right. At the edge of the plot, there was only one Incubus remaining, leaning against a weathered headstone adorned with a weeping angel. He looked older than I was, maybe nineteen, with short, black hair and the same pale skin as the rest of his kind. But unlike the other Incubuses, he hadn't disappeared before the dawn. As I watched him, he moved out from under the shadow of the oak directly into the bright morning light, with his eyes closed and his face tilted toward the sun, as if it was only shining for him. Amma was wrong. He couldn't be one of them. He stood there basking in the sunlight, an impossibility for an Incubus. What was he? And what was he doing here? He moved closer and caught my eye, as if he could feel me watching him. That's when I saw his eyes. They weren't the black eyes of an Incubus. They were Caster green. He stopped in front of Lena, jamming his hands in his pockets, tipping his head slightly. Not a bow, but an awkward show of deference, which somehow seemed more honest. He had crossed the invisible aisle, and in a moment of real Southern gentility, he could have been the son of Macon Ravenwood himself. Which made me hate him. "I'm sorry for your loss." He opened her hand and placed a small silver object in it, like the ones everyone had thrown onto Macon's casket. Her fingers closed around it. Before I could move a muscle, the unmistakable ripping sound tore through the air, and he was gone.

Ethan? I saw her legs begin to buckle under the weight of the morning -- the loss, the storm, even the final rip in the sky. By the time I made it to her side and slid my arm under her, she was gone, too. I carried her down the sloping hill, away from Macon and the cemetery. She slept curled in my bed, on and off, for a night and a day. She had a few stray twigs matted in her hair, and her face was still flecked with mud, but she wouldn't go home to Ravenwood, and no one asked her to. I had given her my oldest, softest sweatshirt and wrapped her in our thickest patchwork quilt, but she never stopped shivering, even in her sleep. Boo lay at her feet, and Amma appeared in the doorway every now and then. I sat in the chair by the window, the one I never sat in, and stared out at the sky. I couldn't open it, because a storm was still brewing. As Lena was sleeping, her fingers uncurled. In them was a tiny bird made of silver, a sparrow. A gift from the stranger at Macon's funeral. I tried to take it from her hand just as her fingers tightened around it. Two months later, and I still couldn't look at a bird without hearing the sound of the sky ripping open.

4.17

Burnt Waffles

Four eggs, four strips of bacon, a basket of scratch biscuits (which by Amma's standard meant a spoon had never touched the batter), three kinds of freezer jam, and a slab of butter drizzled with honey. And from the smell of it, across the counter buttermilk batter was separating into squares, turning crisp in the old waffle iron. For the last two months, Amma had been cooking night and day. The counter was piled high with Pyrex dishes -- cheese grits, green bean casserole, fried chicken, and of course, Bing cherry salad, which was really a fancy name for a Jell-O mold with cherries, pineapple, and Coca-Cola in it. Past that, I could make out a coconut cake, orange rolls, and what looked like bourbon bread pudding, but I knew there was more. Since Macon died and my dad left, Amma kept cooking and baking and stacking, as if she could cook her sadness away. We both knew she couldn't. Amma hadn't gone this dark since my mom died. She'd known Macon Ravenwood a lifetime longer than I had, even longer than Lena. No matter how unlikely or unpredictable their relationship was, it had meant something to both of them. They were friends, though I wasn't sure either of them would've admitted it. But I knew the truth. Amma was wearing it all over her face and stacking it all over our kitchen. "Got a call from Dr. Summers." My dad's psychiatrist. Amma didn't look up from the waffle iron, and I didn't point out that you didn't actually need to stare at a waffle iron for it to cook the waffles. "What'd he say?" I studied her back from my seat at the old oak table, her apron strings tied in the middle. I remembered how many times I had tried to sneak up on her and untie those strings. Amma was so short they hung down almost as long as the apron itself, and I thought about that for as long as I could. Anything was better than thinking about my father. "He thinks your daddy's about ready to come home." I held up my empty glass and stared through it, where things looked as distorted as they really were. My dad had been at Blue Horizons, in Columbia, for two months. After Amma found out about the nonexistent book he was pretending to write all year, and the "incident," which is how she referred to my dad nearly jumping off a balcony, she called my Aunt Caroline. My aunt drove him to Blue Horizons that same day -- she called it a spa. The kind of spa you sent your crazy relatives to if they needed what folks in Gatlin referred to as "individual attention," or what everyone outside of the South would call therapy. "Great."

Great. I couldn't see my dad coming home to Gatlin, walking around town in his duck pajamas. There was enough crazy around here already between Amma and me, wedged in between the cream-of-grief casseroles I'd be dropping off at First Methodist around dinnertime, as I did almost every night. I wasn't an expert on feelings, but Amma's were all stirred up in cake batter, and she wasn't about to share them. She'd rather give away the cake. I tried to talk to her about it once, the day after the funeral, but she had shut down the conversation before it even started. "Done is done. Gone is gone. Where Macon Ravenwood is now, not likely we'll ever see him again, not in this world or the Other." She sounded like she'd made her peace with it, but here I was, two months later, still delivering cakes and casseroles. She had lost the two men in her life the same night -- my father and Macon. My dad wasn't dead, but our kitchen didn't make those kinds of distinctions. Like Amma said, gone was gone. "I'm makin' waffles. Hope you're hungry." That was probably all I'd hear from her this morning. I picked up the carton of chocolate milk next to my glass and poured it full out of habit. Amma used to complain when I drank chocolate milk at breakfast. Now she would have cut me up a whole Tunnel of Fudge cake without a word, which only made me feel worse. Even more telling, the Sunday edition of the New York Times wasn't open to the crossword, and her black, extra-sharp #2 pencils were hidden away in their drawer. Amma was staring out the kitchen window at the clouds choking the sky. L. A. C. O. N. I. C. Seven across, which means I don't have to say a thing, Ethan Wate. That's what Amma would have said on any other day. I took a gulp of my chocolate milk and almost choked. Sugar was too sweet, and Amma was too quiet. That's how I knew things had changed. That, and the burnt waffles smoking in the waffle iron. I should have been on my way to school, but instead I turned onto Route 9 and headed for Ravenwood. Lena hadn't been back to school since before her birthday. After Macon's death, Principal Harper had generously granted her permission to work at home with a tutor until she felt up to coming back to Jackson. Considering he had helped Mrs. Lincoln in her campaign to get Lena expelled after the winter formal, I'm sure he was hoping that would be the day after never. I admit, I was a little jealous. Lena didn't have to listen to Mr. Lee drone on about the War of Northern Aggression and the plight of the Confederacy or sit on the Good-Eye Side in English. Abby Porter and I were the only ones sitting there now, so we had to answer all the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde questions in class. What prompts Dr. Jekyll to turn into Mr. Hyde? Were they really any different after all? Nobody had the slightest clue, which was the reason everyone on Mrs. English's glass-eye side was sleeping. But Jackson wasn't the same without Lena, at least not for me. That's why after two months, I was begging her to come back. Yesterday, when she said she'd think about it, I told her she could think about it on the way to school. I found myself back at the fork in the road. It was our old road, mine and Lena's. The one that had taken me off Route 9 and up to Ravenwood the night we met. The first time I realized she was the same girl I'd been dreaming about, long before she ever moved to Gatlin. As soon as I saw the road, I heard the song. It drifted into the Volvo as naturally as if I had turned on the radio. Same song. Same words. Same as it had for the last two months -- when I turned on my iPod, stared at the ceiling, or read a single page of Silver Surfer over and over, without even seeing it.

Seventeen Moons. It was always there. I tried turning the dials on the radio, but it didn't matter. Now it was playing in my head instead of coming out of the speakers, as if someone was Kelting the song to me. Seventeen moons, seventeen years, Eyes where Dark or Light appears, Gold for yes and green for no, Seventeen the last to know ... The song was gone. I knew better than to ignore it, but I also knew how Lena acted every time I tried to bring it up. "It's a song," she would say dismissively. "It doesn't mean anything." "Like Sixteen Moons didn't mean anything? It's about us." It didn't matter if she knew it or even if she agreed. Either way, it was the moment Lena usually switched from defense to offense, and the conversation veered off track. "You mean it's about me. Dark or Light? Whether or not I'm going to go all Sarafine on you? If you've already decided I'm going Dark, why don't you admit it?" At that point, I would say something stupid to change the subject. Until I learned not to say anything at all. So we didn't talk about the song that was playing in my head, same as it was in hers.

Seventeen Moons. We couldn't avoid it. The song had to be about Lena's Claiming, the moment she would become Light or Dark forever. Which could only mean one thing: she wasn't Claimed. Not yet. Gold for yes and green for no? I knew what the song meant -- the gold eyes of a Dark Caster or the green eyes of a Light one. Since the night of Lena's birthday, her Sixteenth Moon, I had tried to tell myself it was all over, that Lena didn't have to be Claimed, that she was some kind of exception. Why couldn't it be different for her, since everything else about her seemed to be so exceptional? But it wasn't different. Seventeen Moons was proof. I'd heard Sixteen Moons for months before Lena's birthday, a harbinger of things to come. Now the words had changed again, and I was faced with another eerie prophecy. There was a choice to be made, and Lena hadn't made it. The songs never lied. At least, they hadn't yet. I didn't want to think about it. As I headed up the long rise leading to the gates of Ravenwood Manor, even the grinding sound of the tires on gravel seemed to repeat the one inescapable truth. If there was a Seventeenth Moon, then it had all been for nothing. Macon's death had been for nothing. Lena would still have to Claim herself for Light or Dark, deciding her fate forever. There was no turning back for Casters, no changing sides. And when she finally made her choice, half her family would die because of it. The Light Casters or the Dark Casters -- the curse promised only one side could survive. But in a family where generations of Casters had no free will and had been Claimed for Light or Dark on their own sixteenth birthdays without any say in the matter, how was Lena supposed to make that kind of choice? All she had wanted, her whole life, was to choose her own destiny. Now she could, and it was like some kind of cruel cosmic joke. I stopped at the gates, turned off the engine, and closed my eyes, remembering -- the rising panic, the visions, the dreams, the song. This time, Macon wouldn't be there to steal away the unhappy endings. There was nobody left to get us out of trouble, and it was coming fast.

4.17

Lemons and Ash

W hen I pulled up in front of Ravenwood, Lena was sitting on the crumbling veranda, waiting. She was wearing an old button-down shirt and jeans and her beat-up Chuck Taylors. For a second, it seemed as if it could've been three months ago and today was just another day. But she was also wearing one of Macon's pinstriped vests, and it wasn't the same. Now that Macon was gone, something about Ravenwood felt wrong. Like going to the Gatlin County Library if Marian, its only librarian, wasn't there, or to the DAR without the most important daughter of the Daughters of the American Revolution herself, Mrs. Lincoln. Or to my parents' study without my mom. Ravenwood looked worse every time I came. Staring out at the archway of weeping willows, it was hard to imagine the garden had deteriorated so quickly. Beds of the same kinds of flowers Amma had painstakingly taught me to weed as a kid were fighting for space in the dry earth. Beneath the magnolias, clusters of hyacinth were tangled with hibiscus, and heliotrope infested the forget-me-nots, as if the garden itself was in mourning. Which was entirely possible. Ravenwood Manor had always seemed to have a mind of its own. Why should the gardens be any different? The weight of Lena's grief probably wasn't helping. The house was a mirror for her moods, the same way it had always been for Macon's. When he died, he left Ravenwood to Lena, and sometimes I wondered whether it would have been better if he hadn't. The house was looking bleaker by the day, instead of better. Every time I drove up the hill, I found myself holding my breath, waiting for the smallest sign of life, something new, something blooming. Every time I reached the top, all I saw were more bare branches. Lena climbed into the Volvo, a complaint already on her lips. "I don't want to go." "No one wants to go to school." "You know what I mean. That place is awful. I'd rather stay here and study Latin all day." This wasn't going to be easy. How could I convince her to go somewhere I didn't even want to go? High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional. I decided reverse psychology was my only shot. "High school is supposed to be the worst years of your life." "Is that so?" "Definitely. You have to come back." "And that will make me feel better how, exactly?" "I don't know. How about, it's so bad, it'll make the rest of your life seem great in comparison?" "By your logic, I should spend the day with Principal Harper." "Or try out for cheerleading." She twirled her necklace around her finger, her distinctive collection of charms knocking against each other. "It's tempting." She smiled, almost a laugh, and I knew she was going with me. Lena rested her shoulder against mine the whole way to school. But when we got to the parking lot, she couldn't bring herself to get out of the car. I didn't dare turn off the engine. Savannah Snow, the queen of Jackson High, walked past us, hitching her tight T-shirt above her jeans. Emily Asher, her second in command, followed behind, texting as she slid between cars. Emily saw us and grabbed Savannah by the arm. They stopped, the response of any Gatlin girl whose mamma had raised her right, when faced with a relative of the recently departed. Savannah clutched her books to her chest, shaking her head at us sadly. It was like watching an old silent movie.

Your uncle's in a better place now, Lena. He's up at the pearly gates, where a chorus a angels is leadin' him to his ever-lovin' Maker. I translated for Lena, but she already knew what they were thinking.

Stop it! Lena slid her battered spiral notebook in front of her face, trying to disappear. Emily held up her hand, a timid half-wave. Giving us our space, letting us know she was not only well bred but sensitive. I didn't have to be a mind reader to know what she was thinking either.

I'm not comin' over there, because I'm a lettin' you grieve in peace, sweet Lena Du-channes. But I will always, and I do mean always, be here for you, like the Good Book and my mamma taught me. Emily nodded to Savannah, and the two of them walked slowly and sadly away, as if they hadn't started the Guardian Angels, Jackson's version of a neighborhood watch, a few months ago with the sole purpose of getting Lena kicked out of school. In a way, this was worse. Emory ran to catch up with them, but he saw us and slowed to a somber walk, rapping on the hood of my car as he walked by. He hadn't said a word to me in months, but now he was showing his support. They were all so full of crap. "Don't say it." Lena had rolled herself down into a ball in the passenger's seat. "Can't believe he didn't take off his cap. His mamma's gonna kick the tar outta him when he gets home." I turned off the engine. "Play this right and you might make the cheer squad after all, sweet Lena Du-channes." "They're ... they're such --" She was so angry for a minute I regretted saying it. But it was going to be happening all day, and I wanted her to be prepared before she set foot in the halls of Jackson. I had spent too much time being Poor

Ethan Wate Whose Mamma Died Just Last Year not to know that. "Hypocrites?" That was an understatement. "Sheep." That, too. "I don't want to be in their squad, and I don't want a seat at their table. I don't want them to even look at me. I know Ridley was manipulating them with her powers, but if they hadn't thrown that party on my birthday -- if I had stayed inside Ravenwood like Uncle Macon had wanted ..." I didn't need her to finish. He might still be alive. "You can't know that, L. Sarafine would have found another way to get to you." "They hate me, and that's how it should be." Her hair was beginning to curl, and for a second I thought there was going to be a downpour. She put her head in her hands, ignoring the tears that were losing themselves in her crazy hair. "Something has to stay the same. I'm nothing like them." "I hate to break it to you, but you never were, and you never will be." "I know, but something's changed. Everything's changed." I looked out my window. "Not everything." Boo Radley stared back at me. He was sitting on the faded white line of the parking space next to ours, as if he had been waiting for this moment. Boo still followed Lena everywhere, like a good Caster dog. I thought about how many times I had considered giving that dog a ride. Saving him some time. I opened the door, but Boo didn't move. "Fine. Be that way." I started to pull the door closed, knowing Boo would never get in. As I did, he leaped up into my lap, across the gearshift, and into Lena's arms. She buried her face in his fur, breathing deeply, as if the mangy dog created some kind of air that was different from the air outside. They were one quivering mass of black hair and black fur. For a minute, the whole universe seemed fragile, like it could fall apart if I so much as blew in the wrong direction or pulled the wrong thread. I knew what I needed to do. I couldn't explain the feeling, but it came over me as powerfully as the dreams had, when I saw Lena for the first time. The dreams we had always shared, so real they left mud in my sheets, or river water dripping onto my floor. This feeling was no different. I needed to know what thread to pull. I needed to be the one who knew the right direction. She couldn't see her way clear of where she was right now, so it had to be me. Lost. That's what she was, and it was the one thing I couldn't let her be. I turned on the car and shifted into reverse. We had only made it as far as the parking lot, and I knew without a word that it was time to drive Lena home. Boo kept his eyes closed the whole way. We took an old blanket back to Greenbrier and curled up near Genevieve's grave, on a tiny patch of grass next to the hearthstone and the crumbling rock wall. The blackened trees and meadows surrounded us on every side, tufts of green only beginning to push through the hard dirt. Even now it was still our spot, the place where we had first talked after Lena shattered the window in English class with a look -- and her Caster powers. Aunt Del couldn't stand to see the burnt cemetery and ruined gardens anymore, but Lena didn't mind. This was the last place she had seen Macon, and that made it safe. Somehow, looking at the wreckage from the fire was familiar, even reassuring. It had come and taken everything in its path, and then it was gone. You didn't have to wonder what else was coming or when it would get here. The grass was wet and green, and I wrapped the blanket around us. "Come closer, you're freezing." She smiled without looking at me. "Since when do I need a reason to come closer?" She settled back into my shoulder and we sat in silence, our bodies warming each other and our fingers braided together, the shock moving up my arm. It was always that way when we touched -- a gentle jolt of electricity that intensified with our every touch. A reminder Casters and Mortals couldn't be together. Not without the Mortal ending up dead. I looked up at the twisted black branches and the bleak sky. I thought about the first day I followed Lena to this garden, the way I'd found her crying in the tall grass. We had watched the gray clouds disappear from an otherwise blue sky, clouds she moved just by thinking about them. The blue sky -- that's what I was to her. She was Hurricane Lena, and I was regular old Ethan Wate. I couldn't imagine what my life would be like without her. "Look." Lena climbed over me and reached up into the crumbling black branches. A perfect yellow lemon, the only one in the garden, surrounded by ash. Lena pulled it loose, and black flakes flew into the air. The yellow peel gleamed in her hand, and she let herself fall back into my arms. "Look at that. Not everything burned." "It'll all grow back, L." "I know." She didn't sound convinced, turning the lemon over and over in her hands. "This time next year, none of this will be black." She looked up at the branches and the sky above our heads, and I kissed her on her forehead, her nose, the perfect crescent-shaped birthmark on her cheekbone, as she tilted up toward me. "Everything will be green. Even these trees will grow again." As we pushed our feet against each other, kicking off our shoes, I could feel a familiar prick of electricity every time our bare skin met. We were so close, her curls were falling into my face. I blew, and they scattered. I was caught in her drag, struck by the current that bound us together and kept us apart. I leaned in to kiss her mouth, and she held the lemon in front of my nose, teasing. "Smell." "Smells like you." Like lemons and rosemary, the scent that had drawn me to Lena when we first met. She sniffed it, making a face. "Sour, like me." "You don't taste sour to me." I pulled her closer, until our hair was full of ash and grass, and the bitter lemon was lost somewhere beneath our feet at the bottom of the blanket. The heat was on my skin, like fire. Even though all I could feel was a biting cold whenever I held her hand lately, when we kissed -- really kissed -- there was nothing but heat. I loved her, atom by atom, one burning cell at a time. We kissed until my heart began skipping beats, and the edges of what I could see and feel and hear began to fade into darkness.... Lena pushed me away, for my own good, and we lay in the grass as I tried to catch my breath.

Are you okay? I'm -- I'm good. I wasn't, but I didn't say anything. I thought I smelled something burning and realized it was the blanket. It was smoldering from underneath, where it was touching the ground. Lena pushed herself up and pulled back the blanket. The grass beneath us was charred and trampled. "Ethan. Look at the grass." "What about it?" I was still trying to catch my breath, but I was trying not to show it. Since Lena's birthday, things had only gotten worse, physically. I couldn't stop touching her, though sometimes I couldn't stand the pain of that touch. "It's burnt now, too." "That's weird." She looked at me evenly, her eyes strangely dark and bright at the same time. She tossed the grass. "It was me." "You are pretty hot."

"You can't be joking right now. It's getting worse." We sat next to each other, looking out at what was left of Greenbrier. But we weren't really looking at Greenbrier. We were looking at the power of the other fire. "Just like my mom." She sounded bitter. Fire was the trademark of a Cataclyst, and Sarafine's fire had burnt every inch of these fields the night of Lena's birthday. Now Lena was starting fires unintentionally. My stomach tightened. "The grass will grow back, too." "What if I don't want it to?" she said softly, strangely, as she let another handful of charred grass fall through her fingers. "What?" "Why should it?" "Because life goes on, L. The birds do their thing, and the bees do theirs. Seeds get scattered, and everything grows back." "Then it all gets burnt again. If you're lucky enough to be around me." There was no point arguing with Lena when she was in one of these moods. A lifetime with Amma going dark had taught me that. "Sometimes it does." She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. Her shape cast a shadow much larger than she actually was. "But I'm still lucky." I moved my leg until it caught the light, throwing a long line of my shadow into hers. We sat like that, side by side, with only our shadows touching, until the sun went down and they stretched toward the black trees and disappeared into dusk. We listened to the cicadas in silence and tried not to think until the rain started falling again.

5.1

Falling

In the next few weeks, I successfully convinced Lena to leave the house with me a total of three times. Once to the movies with Link -- my best friend since second grade -- where even her signature combination of popcorn and Milk Duds didn't cheer her up. Once to my house to eat Amma's molasses cookies and watch a zombie marathon, my version of a dream date. It wasn't. And once for a walk along the Santee, where we ended up turning around after ten minutes with sixty bug bites between us. Wherever she was, she didn't want to be. Today was different. She had finally found somewhere she was comfortable, even if it was the last place I expected. I walked in her room to find her lying sprawled across the ceiling, arms flung across the plaster, her hair spread out like a black fan around her head. "Since when can you do that?" I was used to Lena's powers by now, but since her sixteenth birthday they seemed to be getting stronger and wilder, as if she was awkwardly growing into herself as a Caster. With every day, Lena the Caster girl was more unpredictable, stretching her powers to see what she could do. As it turned out, what she could do these days was cause all kinds of trouble. Like the time Link and I were driving to school in the Beater, and one of his songs came on the radio as if the station was playing it. Link was so shocked he'd swerved a good two feet into Mrs. Asher's front hedge. "An accident," Lena said with a crooked smile. "One of Link's songs was stuck in my head." Nobody had ever gotten one of Link's songs stuck in their head. But Link had believed her, which made his ego even more unbearable. "What can I say? I have that effect on the ladies. This voice is as smooth as butter." A week after that, Link and I had been walking down the hall, and Lena came up and gave me a big hug, right as the bell was ringing. I figured she had finally decided to come back to school. But she wasn't actually there at all. It was some kind of projection, or whatever the Caster word was for making your boyfriend look like an idiot. Link thought I was trying to hug him, so he called me "Lover Boy" for days. "I missed you. Is that such a crime?" Lena thought it was funny, but I was starting to wish Gramma would step in and ground her, or whatever it was you did to a Natural who was up to no good.

Don't be a baby. I said I was sorry, didn't I? You're as big a menace as Link in fifth grade, the year he sucked all the juice out of my mom's tomatoes with a straw. It won't happen again. I swear. That's what Link said back then. But he stopped, right? Yeah. When we stopped growing tomatoes. "Come down." "I like it better up here." I grabbed her hand. A current crept through my arm, but I didn't let go, pulling her down onto the bed next to me. "Ouch." She was laughing. I could see her shoulder shudder even though her back was to me. Or maybe she wasn't laughing but crying, which was rare these days. The crying had mostly stopped and had been replaced by something worse. Nothing. Nothing was deceptive. Nothing was much harder to describe or fix or stop.

Do you want to talk about it, L? About what? I pulled her closer, resting my head on hers. The shaking slowed, and I held her as tight as I could. Like she was still on the ceiling, and I was the one hanging on.

Nothing. I shouldn't have complained about the ceiling. There were crazier places you could hang out. Like where we were now. "I have a bad feeling about this." I was sweating, but I couldn't wipe my face. I needed my hands to stay right where they were. "That's weird." Lena smiled down at me. "Because I have a very good feeling about it." Her hair was blowing in a breeze, though I wasn't sure which kind. "Besides, we're almost there." "You realize this is insane, right? If a cop drives by, we're gonna get arrested or sent to Blue Horizons to visit my dad." "It's not crazy. It's romantic. Couples come here all the time." "When people go to the water tower, L, they aren't talking about the top of the water tower." Which is where we would be in a minute. Just the two of us, a wobbly iron ladder about a hundred feet above the ground, and a bright blue Carolina sky. I tried not to look down. Lena had talked me into climbing to the top. There was something about the excitement in her voice that made me go along with it, as if something so stupid might be able to make her feel the way she did the last time we were here. Smiling, happy, in a red sweater. I remembered, because there was a piece of red yarn hanging from her charm necklace. She must have remembered, too. So here we were, stuck on a ladder, looking up so we didn't look down. Once we reached the top and I looked out at the view, I understood. Lena was right. It was better up here. Everything was so far away that it didn't even matter. I let my legs dangle over the edge. "My mom used to collect pictures of old water towers." "Yeah?" "Like the Sisters collect spoons. Only for my mom, it was water towers and postcards from the World's Fair." "I thought all water towers looked like this one. Like a big white spider." "Somewhere in Illinois, there's one shaped like a ketchup bottle." She laughed. "And there's one that looks like a little house, this high off the ground." "We should live there. I'd go up once and never come back down." She lay back on the warm white paint. "I guess in Gatlin it should be a peach, a big old Gatlin peach." I leaned back next to her. "They already have one, but it's not in Gatlin. It's over in Gaffney. Guess they thought of it first." "What about a pie? We could paint this tank to look like one of Amma's pies. She'd like that." "Haven't seen one of those. But my mom had a picture of one shaped like a corncob." "I'd still rather have the house." Lena stared up at the sky, where there wasn't a cloud in sight. "I'd take the corncob or the ketchup, if you were there." She reached for my hand and we stayed like that, at the edge of Summerville's plain white water tower, looking out at Gatlin County as if it was a tiny toy land full of tiny toy people. As small as the cardboard village my mom used to keep under our Christmas tree. How could people that small have any problems at all? "Hey, I brought you something." I watched as she sat up, looking at me like a little kid. "What is it?" I looked over the edge of the water tower. "Maybe we should wait until we can't fall to our deaths." "We're not going to die. Don't be such a chicken." I reached into my back pocket. It wasn't anything special, but I'd had it for a while now, and I was hoping it might help her find her way back to herself. I pulled out a mini Sharpie, with a key ring on it. "See? It fits on your necklace, like this." Trying not to fall, I reached for Lena's necklace, the one she never took off. A tangle of charms, each one meant something to her -- the flattened penny from the machine at the Cineplex, where we had our first date. A silver moon Macon had given her the night of the winter formal. The button from the vest she was wearing the night in the rain. They were Lena's memories, and she carried them with her as if she might lose them without proof of those few perfect moments of happiness. I snapped the Sharpie onto the chain. "Now you can write wherever you are." "Even on ceilings?" She looked at me and smiled, a little crooked, a little sad. "Even on water towers." "I love it." She spoke quietly, pulling the cap off the Sharpie. Before I knew it, she was drawing a heart. Black ink on white paint, a heart hidden at the top of the Summerville water tower. I was happy for a second. Then I felt like I was falling all the way down. Because she wasn't thinking about us. She was thinking about her next birthday, the Seventeenth Moon. She was already counting down. In the center of the heart, she didn't write our names. She wrote a number.

5.16

The Call

I didn't ask her about what she'd written on the water tower, but I didn't forget it. How could I, when all we had done for the past year was count down to the inevitable? When I finally asked why she'd written it or what she was counting down to, she wouldn't say. And I had the feeling she really didn't know. Which was even worse than knowing. It had been two weeks since then, and as far as I could tell Lena still hadn't written anything in her notebook. She was wearing the little Sharpie on her necklace, but it looked as new as the day I bought it at the Stop & Steal. It was weird not to see her writing, scribbling on her hands or her worn-out Converse, which she didn't wear much these days. She had started wearing her thrashed black boots instead. Her hair was different, too. Almost always tied back, as if she thought she could yank the magic right out of it. We were sitting on the top step of my porch, the same place we had been sitting when Lena first told me she was a Caster, a secret she had never shared with a Mortal before. I was pretending to read Jekyll and Hyde. Lena was staring down at the blank pages of her spiral notebook, as if the thin blue lines held the answer to all her problems. When I wasn't watching Lena, I was staring down my street. My dad was coming home today. Amma and I had visited him on Family Day every week since my aunt checked him into Blue Horizons. Even though he wasn't back to his old self, I had to admit he was acting almost like a regular person again. But I was still nervous. "They're here." The screen door slammed behind me. Amma was standing on the porch in her tool apron, the kind she preferred over a traditional one, especially on days like this. She was holding the gold charm around her neck, rubbing it between her fingers. I looked down the street, but the only thing I saw was Billy Watson riding his bike. Lena leaned forward to get a better look.

I don't see a car. I didn't either, but I knew I would in about five seconds. Amma was proud, particularly when it came to her abilities as a Seer. She wouldn't say they were here unless she knew they were coming.

It'll be here. Sure enough, my aunt's white Cadillac made the right onto Cotton Bend. Aunt Caroline had the window rolled down, what she liked to call 360 air conditioning, and I could see her waving from down the block. I stood up as Amma elbowed her way past me. "Come on, now. Your daddy deserves a proper homecomin'." That was code for Get your butt down to the curb, Ethan Wate . I took a deep breath.

Are you okay? Lena's hazel eyes caught the sun. Yeah. I lied. She must have known, but she didn't say a word. I took her hand. It was cold, the way she always was now, and the current of electricity felt more like the sting of frostbite. "Mitchell Wate. Don't tell me you've been eatin' anybody's pie but mine. 'Cause you look like you fell into the cookie jar and couldn't find your way back out." My dad gave her a knowing look. Amma had raised him, and he knew her teasing held as much love as any hug. I stood there while Amma fussed over him as if he was ten years old. She and my aunt were chattering away like the three of them had just come home from the market. My dad smiled at me weakly. It was the same smile he gave me when we visited Blue Horizons. It said, I'm not crazy anymore, just ashamed . He was wearing his old Duke T-shirt and jeans, and somehow he looked younger than I remembered. Except for the crinkling lines around his eyes, which deepened as he pulled me in for an awkward hug. "How you doing?" My voice caught in my throat for a second, and I coughed. "Good." He looked over at Lena. "Nice to see you again, Lena. I was sorry to hear about your uncle." Those were hard-bred Southern manners for you. He had to acknowledge Macon's passing, even in a moment as awkward as this one. Lena tried to smile, but she only managed to look as uncomfortable as I felt. "Thank you, sir." "Ethan, come on over here and give your favorite aunt a hug." Aunt Caroline held out her hands. I wanted to throw my arms around her and let her squeeze the knot right out of my chest. "Let's go on inside." Amma waved at my dad from the top of the porch. "I made a Coca-Cola cake and fried chicken. If we don't get in there soon, that chicken'll have a mind to find its way home." Aunt Caroline looped her arm through my dad's and led him up the stairs. She had the same brown hair and small frame as my mom, and for a second it felt like my parents were home again, walking through the old screen door of Wate's Landing. "I have to get home." Lena was clutching her notebook against her chest like a shield. "You don't have to go. Come in."

Please. I wasn't offering to be polite. I didn't want to go in there alone. A few months ago, Lena would have known that. But I guess today her mind was somewhere else, because she didn't. "You should spend some time with your family." She stood up on her toes and kissed me, her lips barely touching my cheek. She was halfway to the car before I could argue. I watched Larkin's Fastback disappear down my street. Lena didn't drive the hearse anymore. As far as I knew, she hadn't even looked at it since Macon died. Uncle Barclay had parked it behind the old barn and thrown a tarp over it. Instead, she was driving Larkin's car, all black and chrome. Link had foamed at the mouth the first time he saw it. "Do you know how many chicks I could pull with that ride?" After her cousin had betrayed her whole family, I didn't understand why Lena would want to drive his car. When I had asked her, she'd shrugged and said, "He won't be needing it anymore." Maybe Lena thought she was punishing Larkin by driving it. He had contributed to Macon's death, something she would never forgive. I watched the car turn the corner, wishing I could disappear along with it. By the time I made it to the kitchen, there was already chicory coffee brewing -- and trouble. Amma was on the phone, pacing in front of the sink, and every minute or two she would cover the receiver with her hand and report the conversation on the other end to Aunt Caroline. "They haven't seen her since yesterday." Amma put the phone back to her ear. "You should make Aunt Mercy a toddy and put her to bed until we find her." "Find who?" I looked at my dad, and he shrugged. Aunt Caroline pulled me over to the sink and whispered the way Southern ladies do when something is too awful to say out loud. "Lucille Ball. She's missin'." Lucille Ball was Aunt Mercy's Siamese cat, who spent most of her time running around my great-aunts' front yard on a leash attached to a clothesline, an activity the Sisters referred to as exercising. "What do you mean?" Amma covered the receiver with her hand again, narrowing her eyes and setting her jaw. The Look. "Seems somebody put the idea in your aunt's head that cats don't need to be tied up, because they always come back home. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" It wasn't a question. We both knew I was the one who had been saying it for years. "But cats aren't supposed to be on leashes." I tried to defend myself, but it was too late. Amma glared at me and turned to Aunt Caroline. "Seems Aunt Mercy's been waitin', sittin' on the porch, starin' at an empty leash hangin' on the clothesline." She took her hand off the receiver. "You need to get her in the house and put her feet up. If she gets lightheaded, boil some dandelion." I slunk out of the kitchen before Amma's eyes got any narrower. Great. My hundred-year-old aunt's cat was gone, and it was my fault. I'd have to call Link and see if he'd drive around town with me and look for Lucille. Maybe Link's demo tapes would scare her out of hiding. "Ethan?" My dad was standing in the hall, right outside of the kitchen door. "Can I talk to you for a second?" I had been dreading this, the part where he apologized for everything and tried to explain why he had ignored me for almost a year. "Yeah, sure." But I didn't know if I wanted to hear it. I wasn't really angry anymore. When I almost lost Lena, there was a part of me that understood why my dad had come completely unhinged. I couldn't imagine my life without Lena, and my dad had loved my mom for more than eighteen years. I felt sorry for him now, but it still hurt. My dad ran his hand through his hair and edged closer to me. "I wanted to tell you how sorry I am." He paused, staring down at his feet. "I don't know what happened. One day, I was in there writing, and the next day all I could do was think about your mom -- sit in her chair, smell her books, imagine her reading over my shoulder." He studied his hands, as if he was talking to them instead of me. Maybe that was a trick they taught you at Blue Horizons. "It was the only place I felt close to her. I couldn't let her go." He looked up at the old plaster ceiling, and a tear escaped from the corner of his eye, running slowly down the side of his face. My dad had lost the love of his life, and he had come unraveled like an old sweater. I'd watched, but I hadn't done anything about it. Maybe he wasn't the only one to blame. I knew I was supposed to smile now, but I didn't feel like it. "I get it, Dad. I wish you'd said something. I missed her, too. You know?" His voice was quiet when he finally spoke. "I didn't know what to say." "It's okay." I didn't know if I meant it yet, but I could see relief spread across his face. He reached around and hugged me, squeezing my back with his fists for a second. "I'm here now. Do you want to talk about it?" "About what?" "Things you need to know when you have a girlfriend." There was nothing I wanted to talk about less. "Dad, we don't have to --" "I have a lot of experience, you know. Your mother taught me a thing or two about women over the years." I started planning my escape route. "If you ever want to talk about, you know ..." I could hurl myself through the study window and squeeze between the hedge and the house. "Feelings." I almost laughed in his face. "What?" "Amma says Lena's having a hard time with her uncle's passing. She's not acting like herself." Lying on the ceiling. Refusing to go to school. Not opening up to me. Climbing water towers. "No, she's all right." "Well, women are a different species." I nodded and tried not to look him in the eye. He had no idea how right he was. "As much as I loved your mother, half the time I couldn't have told you what was going on in her head. Relationships are complicated. You know you can ask me anything." What could I ask? What do you do when your heart almost stops beating every time you kiss? Are there times when you should and shouldn't read each other's minds? What are the early warning signs that your girlfriend is being Claimed for all time by good or evil? He squeezed my shoulder one last time. I was still trying to put together a sentence when he let go. He was staring down the hall, in the direction of the study. The framed portrait of Ethan Carter Wate was hanging in the hallway. I still wasn't used to seeing it, even though I was the one who had hung it there the day after Macon's funeral. It had been hidden under a sheet my whole life, which seemed wrong. Ethan Carter Wate had walked away from a war he didn't believe in and died trying to protect the Caster girl he loved. So I had found a nail and hung the painting. It felt right. After that, I went into my dad's study and picked up the sheets of paper strewn all over the room. I looked at the scribbles and circles one last time, the evidence of how deep love can

run and how long loss can last. Then I cleaned up and threw the pages away. That felt right, too. My dad walked over to the painting, studying it as if he was seeing it for the first time. "I haven't seen this guy in a long time." I was so relieved we had moved on to a new subject, the words came tumbling out. "I hung it up. I hope it's okay. But it seemed like it belonged out here, instead of under some old sheet." For a minute, my dad stared up at the portrait of the boy in the Confederate uniform, who didn't look much older than me. "This painting always had a sheet over it when I was a kid. My grandparents never said much about it, but they weren't about to hang a deserter on the wall. After I inherited this place, I found it covered up in the attic and brought it down to the study." "Why didn't you hang it up?" I never imagined that my dad had stared at the same hidden outline when he was a kid. "I don't know. Your mother wanted me to. She loved his story -- the way he walked away from the war, even though it ended up costing him his life. I meant to hang it. I was just so used to seeing it covered up. Before I got around to it, your mom died." He ran his hand along the bottom of the carved frame. "You know, you were named after him." "I know." My dad looked at me as if he was looking at me for the first time, too. "She was crazy about that painting. I'm glad you hung it up. It's where he belongs." I didn't escape the fried chicken or Amma's guilt trip. So after dinner, I drove around the Sisters' neighborhood with Link looking for Lucille. Link called her name between bites of a chicken leg wrapped in an oily paper towel. Every time he ran his hand over his spiky blond hair, the shine got shinier from all the grease. "You shoulda brought more fried chicken along. Cats dig chicken. They eat birds in the wild." Link was driving slower than usual so I could keep an eye out for Lucille while he beat time to "Love Biscuit," his band's terrible new song, on the steering wheel. "Then what? You'd drive around while I hung out the window with a chicken leg in my hand?" Link was so transparent. "You just want more of Amma's chicken." "You know it. And Coca-Cola cake." He hung his drumstick bone out the window. "Here, kitty kitty ..." I scanned the sidewalk, looking for a Siamese cat, but something else caught my eye -- a crescent moon. It was on a license plate stuck between a bumper sticker of the Stars and Bars, the Confederate flag, and one for Bubba's Truck and Trailer. The same old South Carolina plates with the state symbol I had seen a thousand times, only I'd never thought about it before. A blue palmetto and a crescent moon, maybe a Caster moon. The Casters really had been here a long time. "Cat's stupider than I thought, if he doesn't know about Amma's fried chicken." "She. Lucille Ball's a girl." "It's a cat." Link swerved, and we turned the corner onto Main. Boo Radley was sitting on the curb, watching the Beater roll by. His tail thumped, one lonely thump of recognition, as we disappeared down the road. The loneliest dog in town. At the sight of Boo, Link cleared his throat. "Speakin' a girls, how're things with Lena?" He hadn't seen much of her, though he'd seen more than most people had. Lena spent most of her time at Ravenwood under the watchful eyes of Gramma and Aunt Del, or hiding from their watchful eyes, depending on the day. "She's dealing." It wasn't a lie, exactly. "Is she? I mean, she seems kinda different. Even for Lena." Link was one of the few people in town who knew Lena's secret. "Her uncle died. That kind of thing changes you." Link should've known that better than anyone. He'd watched me try to make sense of my mother's death, and then a world without her in it. He knew it was impossible. "Yeah, but she hardly talks, and she's wearin' his clothes. Don't you think that's sorta weird?" "She's fine." "If you say so, man." "Just drive. We have to find Lucille." I looked out the window at the empty street. "Stupid cat." Link shrugged and cranked up the volume. His band, the Holy Rollers, shuddered through the speakers. "The Girl's Gone Away." Getting dumped was the theme of every song Link wrote. It was his way of dealing. I still hadn't figured out mine. We never found Lucille, and I never got the conversation with Link, or my dad, out of my mind. My house was quiet, which isn't what you want a house to be if you're trying to run away from your thoughts. The window in my room was open, but the air was as hot and stagnant as everything else today. Link was right. Lena was acting strange. But it had only been a few months. She'd snap out of it, and things would be the way they were before. I dug through the piles of books and papers on my desk, looking for A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , my go-to book for taking my mind off things. Under a stack of old Sandman comics, I found something else. It was a package, wrapped in Marian's signature brown paper and tied with string. But it didn't have GATLIN COUNTY LIBRARY stamped on it. Marian was my mother's oldest friend and the Gatlin County Head Librarian. She was also a Keeper in the Caster world -- a Mortal who guarded Caster secrets and history, and, in Marian's case, the Lunae Libri, a Caster Library filled with secrets of its own. She had given me the package after Macon died, but I had forgotten all about it. It was his journal, and she thought Lena would want to have it. Marian was wrong. Lena didn't want to see it or touch it. She wouldn't even let it into Ravenwood. "You keep it," she had said. "I don't think I could bear to see his handwriting." It had been collecting dust on my desk ever since. I turned it over in my hands. It was heavy, almost too heavy to be a book. I wondered what it looked like. It was probably old, made of cracked leather. I untied the string and unwrapped it. I wasn't going to read it, just look at it. But when I pulled the paper away, I realized it wasn't a book. It was a black wooden box, intricately carved with strange Caster symbols. I ran my hand over the top, wondering what he wrote about. I couldn't imagine him writing poetry like Lena. It was probably full of horticultural notes. I opened the lid carefully. I wanted to see something Macon had touched every day, something that was important to him. The lining was black satin, and the pages inside were unbound and yellowed, written in Macon's fading spidery script. I touched a page, with a single finger. The sky began to spin, and I felt myself pitching forward. The floor rushed up to meet me, but as I hit the ground, I fell through it and found myself in a cloud of smoke --

Fires burned along the river, the only traces of the plantations that had stood there just hours ago. Greenbrier was already engulfed in flames. Ravenwood would be next. The Union soldiers must have been taking a break, drunk from their victory and the liquor they had pillaged from the wealthiest homes in Gatlin. Abraham didn't have much time. The soldiers were coming, and he was going to have to kill them. It was the only way to save Ravenwood. The Mortals didn't stand a chance against him, even if they were soldiers. They were no match for an Incubus. And if his brother, Jonah, ever came back from the Tunnels, the soldiers would have two of them to contend with. The guns were Abraham's only concern. Even though Mortal weapons couldn't kill his kind, the bullets would weaken him, which might give the soldiers the time they needed to set fire to Ravenwood. Abraham needed to feed, and even through the smoke, he could smell the desperation and fear of a Mortal nearby. Fear would make him strong. It provided more power and sustenance than memories or dreams. Abraham Traveled toward the scent. But when he materialized in the woods beyond Greenbrier, he knew he was too late. The scent was faint. In the distance, he could see Genevieve Duchannes hunched over a body in the mud. Ivy, Greenbrier's cook, was standing behind Genevieve, clutching something against her chest. The old woman sawAbraham and rushed toward him. "Mr. Ravenwood, thank the Lord." She lowered her voice. "You have to take this. Put it somewhere safe till I can come for it." Pulling a heavy black book from the folds of her apron, she thrust it into Abraham's hands. As soon as he touched it, Abraham could feel its power. The book was alive, pulsating against his palms as if it had a heartbeat. He could almost hear it whispering to him, beckoning him to take it -- to open it and release whatever was hiding inside. There were no words on its cover, only a single crescent moon. Abraham ran his fingers over the edges. Ivy was still talking, mistaking Abraham's silence for hesitation. "Please, Mr. Ravenwood. I got no one else to give it to. And I can't leave it with Miss Genevieve. Not now." Genevieve raised her head as if she could hear them through the rain and the roar of the flames. The moment Genevieve turned toward them, Abraham understood. He could see her yellow eyes glowing in the darkness. The eyes of a Dark Caster. In that moment, he also understood what he was holding. The Book of Moons.

He had seen the Book before, in the dreams of Genevieve's mother, Marguerite. It was a book of infinite power, a book Marguerite feared and revered in equal measure. One she hid from her husband and her daughters, and would never have allowed into the hands of a Dark Caster or an Incubus. A book that could save Ravenwood. Ivy scooped something from inside the folds of her skirt and rubbed it across the face of the Book. The white crystals rolled down over the edges. Salt. The weapon of superstitious island women, who brought their own brand of power with them from the Sugar Islands, where their ancestors were born. They believed it warded off Demons, a belief that had always amused Abraham. "I'll come for it, soon as I can. I swear." "I will keep it safe. You have my word." Abraham brushed some of the salt from the Book's cover so he could feel its heat against his skin. He turned back toward the woods. He would walk a few yards, for Ivy's benefit. It always scared the Gullah women to see him Travel, to be reminded of what he was. "Put it away, Mr. Ravenwood. Whatever you do, don't open it. That book brings nothin' but misery to anyone who messes with it. Don't listen to it when it calls you. I'll come for it." But Ivy's warning had come too late. Abraham was already listening. When I came to, I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at my ceiling. It was painted sky blue, like all the ceilings in our house, to fool the carpenter bees that nested there. I sat up, dizzy. The box was beside me, the lid shut. I opened it, and the pages were inside. This time I didn't touch them. None of this made sense. Why was I having visions again? Why was I seeing Abraham Ravenwood, a man who folks in town had been suspicious of for generations because Ravenwood was the only plantation to survive the Great Burning? Not that I believed much of anything the folks in town had to say. But when Genevieve's locket triggered the visions, there had been a reason. Something Lena and I needed to figure out. What did Abraham Ravenwood have to do with us? The common thread was The Book of Moons. It was in the locket visions and in this one. But the Book was gone. The last time anyone had seen it was the night of Lena's birthday, when it was lying on the table in the crypt, surrounded by fire. Like so many things, it was nothing but ashes now.

5.17

All That Remains

W hen I went to school the next day, I sat alone with Link and his four sloppy joes at the lunch table. While I ate my pizza, all I could think about was what Link said about Lena. He was right. She had changed, a little bit at a time, until I almost couldn't remember how things used to be. If I had anyone to talk to about it, I knew they would say to give her time. I also knew that was just something people said when there was nothing left to say and nothing you could do. Lena wasn't coming out of it. She wasn't coming back to herself or to me. If anything, she was drifting farther away from me than anyone else. More and more, I couldn't reach her, not on the inside, not with Kelting or kissing or any of the other complicated or uncomplicated ways we used to touch. Now when I took her hand, all I could feel was the chill. And when Emily Asher looked at me from across the lunchroom, there wasn't anything left but pity in her eyes. Once again, I was someone to feel sorry for. I wasn't Ethan Wate Whose Mamma Died Just Last Year. Now I was Ethan

Wate Whose Girlfriend Went Psycho When Her Uncle Died. People knew there were complications, and they knew they hadn't seen Lena in school with me. Even if they didn't like Lena, the miserable love to watch someone else's misery. I had just about cornered the market on miserable. I was worse than miserable, lower than a flattened sloppy joe left behind on a lunchroom tray. I was alone. One morning about a week later, I kept hearing a strange sound, like a grating or a record scratching or a page tearing, in the back of my mind. I was in history class, and we were talking about the Reconstruction, which was the even more boring time after the Civil War when the United States had to put itself back together. In a Gatlin classroom, this chapter was even more embarrassing than it was depressing -- a reminder South Carolina had been a slave state and that we had been on the wrong side of right. We all knew it, but our ancestors had left us with a permanent F on the nation's moral report card. Cuts that run that deep leave scars, no matter what you try to do to heal them. Mr. Lee was still droning on, punctuating each sentence with a dramatic sigh. I was trying not to listen, when I smelled something burning, maybe an overheating engine or a lighter. I looked around the room. It wasn't coming from Mr. Lee, the most frequent source of any horrible smell in my history class. No one else seemed to notice it. The noise grew louder, into a confusing blur of crashing -- ripping, talking, yelling. Lena.

L? No answer. Above the noise, I heard Lena mumbling lines of poetry, and not the kind you send someone for Valentine's Day.

Not waving but drowning ... I recognized the poem, and it wasn't good. Lena reading Stevie Smith was only one step up from the darkest Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar kind of day. It was Lena's red flag, like Link listening to the Dead Kennedys or Amma chopping vegetables for spring rolls with her cleaver.

Hang on, L. I'm coming. Something had changed, and before it could change back, I grabbed my books and took off running. I was out of the room before Mr. Lee's next sigh. Reece wouldn't look at me when I walked through the door. She pointed to the stairs. Ryan, Lena's youngest cousin, was sitting on the bottom step with Boo, looking sad. When I tousled her hair, she held her finger to her lips. "Lena's having a nerve breakup. We're supposed to be quiet until Gramma and Mamma get home." That was an understatement. The door was open a crack, and when I pushed on it, the hinges creaked, like I was walking into a crime scene. It looked like the room had been tossed. The furniture was upside down or busted up or missing altogether. The entire room was covered with pages of books, pages torn and ripped and plastered all along the walls and ceiling and floor. Not a book was left on the shelf. It looked like a library had exploded. Some of the charred pages piled on the floor were still smoking. The only thing I didn't see was Lena.

L? Where are you? I scanned the room. The wall over her bed wasn't covered with the remnants of the books Lena loved. It was covered in something else.

Nobody the dead man & Nobody the living Nobody is giving in & Nobody is giving Nobody hears me but just Nobody cares Nobody fears me but Nobody just stares Nobody belongs to me & Nobody remains No Nobody knows Nothing All that remains are remains Nobody and Nobody. One of them was Macon, right? The dead man. Who was the other? Me? Was that who I was now, Nobody ? Did all guys have to work this hard to figure out their girlfriends? Untwisting the twisted poems written all over their walls in Sharpie or cracked plaster?

All that remains are remains. I touched the wall, smearing away the word remains. Because all that remained was not remains. There had to be more than that -- more to Lena and me, more to everything. It wasn't just Macon. My mom was gone, but as the last few months had shown, some part of her was with me. I had been thinking about her more and more. Claim yourself. It had been my mom's message to Lena, written in the page numbers of books, scattered across the floor of her favorite room at Wate's Landing. Her message to me didn't have to be written anywhere, not in numbers or letters or even dreams. Lena's floor looked a little like the study that day, books lying open all over the place. Except these books were missing their pages, which sent a different message altogether. Pain and guilt. It was the second chapter of every book my Aunt Caroline had given me about the five stages of grief, or however many stages of grief people say there are. Lena had covered shock and denial, the first two, so I should've seen this one coming. For her, I guess it meant giving up one of the things she loved the most. Books. At least, I hoped that's what it meant. I stepped carefully around the empty, burnt book jackets. I heard the muffled sobs before I saw her. I opened the closet door. She was huddled in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.

It's okay, L. She looked up at me, but I wasn't sure what she was seeing.

My books all sounded like him. I couldn't make them stop. It doesn't matter. Everything's okay now. I knew things wouldn't stay that way for long. Nothing was okay. Somewhere along the way between angry and scared and miserable, she had turned a corner. I knew from experience there was no turning back. Gramma had finally intervened. Lena would be going back to school next week, like it or not. Her choice was school or the thing nobody said out loud. Blue Horizons, or whatever the Caster equivalent was. Until then, I was only allowed to see her when I dropped off her homework. I trudged all the way up to her house with a Stop & Steal bag's worth of meaningless worksheets and essay questions.

Why me? What did I do? I guess I'm not supposed to be around anyone who gets me worked up. That's what Reece said. I'm what gets you worked up? I could feel something like a smile tugging at the back of my mind.

Of course you are. Just not the way they think. When her bedroom door finally swung open, I dropped the sack and pulled her into my arms. It had only been a few days since I'd seen her in person, but I missed the smell of her hair, the lemons and rosemary. The familiar things. Today I couldn't smell it, though. I buried my face in her neck.

I missed you, too. Lena looked up at me. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black tights, cut into all kinds of crazy slits up and down her legs. Her hair was squirming loose from the clasp at the back of her neck. Her necklace hung down, twisting on its chain. Her eyes were ringed with darkness that wasn't makeup. I was worried. But when I looked past her to her bedroom, I was even more worried. Gramma had gotten her way. There was not a burnt book, not a thing out of place in the room. That was the problem. There wasn't one streak of Sharpie, not a poem, not a page anywhere in the room. Instead, the walls were covered with images, taped carefully in a row along the perimeter, as if they were some kind of fence trapping her inside.

Sacred. Sleeping. Beloved. Daughter. They were photographs of headstones, taken so close that all I could make out was the rough stubble of the rock behind the chiseled words, and the words themselves.

Father. Joy. Despair. Eternal Rest. "I didn't know you were into photography." I wondered what else I didn't know. "I'm not, really." She looked embarrassed. "They're great." "It's supposed to be good for me. I have to prove to everyone that I know he's really gone." "Yeah. My dad's supposed to keep a feelings journal now." As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Comparing Lena to my dad couldn't be mistaken for a compliment, but she didn't seem to notice. I wondered how long she had been climbing around His Garden of Perpetual Peace with her camera, and how I had missed it.

Soldier. Sleeping. Through a glass, darkly. I came to the last picture, the only one that didn't seem to belong with the rest. It was a motorcycle, a Harley leaning against a gravestone. The shiny chrome of the bike looked out of place next to the worn old stones. My heart started to pound as I looked at it. "What's this one?" Lena dismissed it with a wave. "Some guy visiting a grave, I guess. He was just kind of ... there. I keep meaning to take it down, the lighting's terrible." She reached up past me, pulling the tacks out of the wall. When she reached the last one, the photo vanished, leaving nothing but four tiny holes in her black wall. Aside from the images, the room was nearly empty, as if she'd packed up and gone to college somewhere. The bed was gone. The bookshelf and all the books were gone. The old chandelier we'd made swing so many times I had

thought it would fall from the ceiling was gone. There was a futon on the floor, in the center of the room. Next to it was the tiny silver sparrow. Seeing it flooded my brain with memories from the funeral -- magnolias ripping out of the lawn, the same silver sparrow in her muddy palm. "Everything looks so different." I tried not to think about the sparrow or the reason it would be next to her bed. The reason that had nothing to do with Macon. "Well, you know. Spring cleaning. I had kind of trashed the place." A few tattered books lay on the futon. Without thinking, I flipped one open -- until I realized I'd committed the worst of crimes. Though the outside was covered with an old, taped-up cover from a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inside wasn't a book at all. It was one of Lena's spiral notebooks, and I had opened it up right in front of her. Like it was nothing, or it was mine to read. I realized something else. Most of the pages were blank. The shock was almost as terrible as discovering the pages of my dad's gibberish when I had thought he was writing a novel. Lena carried a notebook around with her wherever she went. If she had stopped scribbling every fifth word into it, things were worse than I thought. She was worse than I thought. "Ethan! What are you doing?" I pulled my hand away, and Lena grabbed the book. "I'm sorry, L." She was furious. "I thought it was just a book. I mean, it looks like a book. I didn't think you would leave your notebook lying around where anyone could read it." She wouldn't look at me, clutching the book to her chest. "Why aren't you writing anymore? I thought you loved to write." She rolled her eyes and opened the notebook to show me. "I do." She fluttered the blank pages, and now they were covered with line upon line of tiny scribbled words, crossed out again and again, revised and rewritten and revisited a thousand times. "You Charmed it?" "I Shifted the words out of Mortal reality. Unless I choose to show them to someone, only a Caster can read them." "That's brilliant. Since Reece, the person most likely to read it, happens to be one." Reece was as nosy as she was bossy. "She doesn't need to. She can read everything in my face." It was true. As a Sybil, Reece could see your thoughts and secrets, even things you were planning to do, just by looking you in the eye. Which was why I generally avoided her. "So, what's with all the secrecy?" I flopped down on Lena's futon. She sat next to me, balancing on her crisscrossed legs. Things were less comfortable than I was pretending they were. "I don't know. I still feel like writing all the time. Maybe I just feel less like being understood, or less like I can be." My jaw tightened. "By me." "That's not what I meant." "What other Mortals would be reading your notebook?" "You don't understand." "I think I do." "Some of it, maybe." "I would understand all of it if you'd let me." "There's no letting, Ethan. I can't explain it." "Let me see it." I held out my hand for her notebook. She raised an eyebrow, handing it to me. "You won't be able to read it." I opened it and looked at it. I didn't know if it was Lena, or the book itself, but the words appeared on the page in front of me slowly, one at a time. It wasn't one of Lena's poems, and it wasn't song lyrics. There weren't many words, just strange drawings, shapes and swirls snaking up and down the page like some collection of tribal designs. At the bottom of the page, there was a list.

what i remember mother ethan macon hunting the fire the wind the rain the crypt the me who is not me the me who would kill two bodies the rain the book the ring amma's charm the moon Lena grabbed the book out of my hand. There were a few more lines on the page, but I never got to read them. "Stop it!" I looked at her. "What was that?" "Nothing, it's private. You shouldn't have been able to see that." "Then why could I?" "I must have done the Verbum Celatum Cast wrong. The Hidden Word." She looked at me anxiously, her eyes softening. "It doesn't matter. I was trying to remember that night. The night Macon ... disappeared." "Died, L. The night Macon died." "I know he died. Of course he died. I just don't feel like talking about it." "I know you're probably depressed. It's normal." "What?" "It's the next stage." Lena's eyes flashed. "I know your mom died, and my uncle died. But I have my own stages of grief. This isn't my feelings journal. I'm not your dad, and I'm not you, Ethan. We aren't as much alike as you think." We looked at each other in a way we hadn't in a long time, maybe ever. There was a nameless moment. I realized we'd been speaking out loud since I got there, without Kelting a word. For the first time, I didn't know what she was thinking, and it was pretty clear she didn't know how I felt either. But then she did. She held out her arms and drew me into them because, for the first time, I was the one who was crying. When I got home, all the lights were out, but I still didn't go inside. I sat down on the porch and watched the fireflies blinking in the dark. I didn't want to see anyone. I wanted to think, and I had a feeling Lena wouldn't be listening. There's something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are. The stars look like they're so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can't. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are. I stared into the darkness for so long that I thought I saw something move by the old oak in our front yard. For a second, my pulse quickened. Most people in Gatlin didn't even lock their doors, but I knew there were plenty of things that could get past a deadbolt. I saw the air shift again, almost imperceptibly, like a heat wave. I realized it wasn't something trying to break into my house. It was something that had broken out from another one. Lucille, the Sisters' cat. I could see her blue eyes shining in the darkness as she stalked onto the porch. "I told everyone you'd find your way back to the house sooner or later. You just found the wrong house." Lucille cocked her head to the side. "You know the Sisters are never gonna let you off that clothesline again after this." Lucille stared back at me as if she understood perfectly. As if she had known the consequences when she took off but, for whatever reason, she left anyway. A firefly blinked in front of me, and Lucille leaped off the step. It flew higher, but that dumb cat kept reaching for it. She didn't seem to know how far away it really was. Like the stars. Like a lot of things.

6.12

The Girl of My Dreams

Darkness. I couldn't see a thing, but I could feel the air draining out of my lungs. I couldn't breathe. The air was filled with smoke, and I was coughing, choking.

Ethan! I could hear her voice, but it was distant and faraway. The air around me was hot. It smelled like ash and death.

Ethan, no! I saw the glint of a knife, over my head, and I heard the sinister laughter. Sarafine. Only I couldn't see her face. As the knife plunged into my stomach, I knew where I was. I was at Greenbrier, on top of the crypt, and I was about to die. I tried to scream, but I couldn't make a sound. Sarafine threw back her head and laughed, her hands on the knife in my stomach. I was dying, and she was laughing. The blood was running all around me, rushing into my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. It had a distinct taste, like copper or salt. My lungs felt like two heaving sacks of cement. When the rush of blood in my ears drowned out her voice, I was overwhelmed with the familiar feeling of loss. Green and gold. Lemons and rosemary. I could smell it through the blood, the smoke, and the ashes. Lena. I always thought I couldn't live without her. Now I wasn't going to have to. "Ethan Wate! Why don't I hear that shower runnin' yet?" I bolted upright in bed, drenched in sweat. I ran my hand under my T-shirt, over my skin. There was no blood, but I could feel the raised impression where the knife had cut me in the dream. I pulled up my shirt and stared at the jagged pink line. A scar cut across my lower abdomen, like a stab wound. It had appeared out of nowhere, an injury from a dream. Only it was real, and it hurt. I hadn't had one of the dreams since Lena's birthday, and I didn't know why they were coming back now, like this. I was used to waking up with mud in my bed or smoke in my lungs, but this was the first time I had ever woken up in pain. I tried to shake it off, telling myself it didn't really happen. But my stomach throbbed. I stared at my open window, wishing Macon was around to steal the end of this dream. I wished he was around for a lot of reasons. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, to see if Lena was there. But I already knew she wouldn't be. I could feel when she had pulled away, which was most of the time, lately. Amma called up the stairs again. "If you're fixin' to be late for your last examination, you'll be sittin' on your sweet corncakes in that room a yours all summer. That's a promise." Lucille Ball was staring at me from the foot of my bed, the way she did most mornings now. After Lucille showed up on our porch, I took her back home to Aunt Mercy, but the next day she was sitting on our porch again. After that, Aunt Prue convinced her sisters that Lucille was a deserter, and the cat moved in with us. I was pretty surprised when Amma opened the door and let Lucille wander in, but she had her reasons. "Nothin' wrong with havin' a cat in the house. They can see what most people can't, like the folks in the Otherworld when they cross back over -- the good ones and the bad. And they get rid a mice." I guess you could say Lucille was the animal kingdom's version of Amma. By the time I made it into the shower, the hot water rolled off me, pushing everything away. Everything except the scar. I turned it up even hotter, but I couldn't keep my mind in the shower. It was tangled up in the dreams, the knife, the laughter -My English final. Crap. I'd fallen asleep before I finished studying. If I failed the test, I would fail the class, Good-Eye Side or not. My grades were not stellar this semester, and by that I mean I was running neck and neck with Link. I wasn't my usual don't-studyand-get-by self. I was already close to failing history, since Lena and I had ditched the mandatory Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill on her birthday. If I failed English, I'd be spending all summer in a school so old it didn't even have air conditioning, or I'd be looking at sophomore year all over again. It was the particularly penetrating problem a person with a pulse should be prepared to ponder today. Assonance, right? Or was it consonance? I was screwed. This was day five of supersized breakfasts. We'd had finals all week, and Amma believed there was a direct correlation between how much I ate and how well I would do. I had eaten my weight in bacon and eggs since Monday. No wonder my stomach was killing me and I was having nightmares. Or at least, that's what I tried to tell myself. I poked at the fried eggs with my fork. "More eggs?" Amma squinted at me suspiciously. "I don't know what you're up to, but I'm in no mood for it." She slid another egg onto my plate. "Don't try my patience today, Ethan Wate." I wasn't about to argue with her. I had enough problems of my own. My dad wandered into the kitchen and opened the cupboard, searching for his Shredded Wheat. "Don't tease Amma. You know she doesn't like it." He looked up at her, shaking his spoon. "That boy of mine is downright S. C. A. B. R. O. U. S. As in ..." Amma glared at him, slamming the cupboard doors shut. "Mitchell Wate, I'll give you a scab or two all your own if you don't stop messin' with my pantry." He laughed, and a second later I could have sworn she was smiling, and I watched as my own crazy father started turning Amma back into Amma again. The moment vanished, popping like a soap bubble, but I knew what I'd seen. Things were changing. I still wasn't used to the sight of my dad walking around during the day, pouring cereal and making small talk. It seemed unbelievable that four months ago my aunt had checked him into Blue Horizons. Although he wasn't exactly a new man, as Aunt Caroline professed, I had to admit I barely recognized him. He wasn't making me chicken salad sandwiches, but these days he was out of the study more and more, and sometimes even out of the house. Marian scored my dad a position at the University of Charleston as a guest lecturer in the English department. Even though the bus ride turned a forty-minute commute into two hours, there was no letting my dad operate heavy machinery, not yet. He seemed almost happy. I mean, relatively speaking, for a guy who was previously holed up in his study for months scribbling like a madman. The bar was pretty low. If things could change that much for my dad, if Amma was smiling, maybe they could change for Lena, too. Couldn't they? But the moment was over. Amma was back on the warpath. I could see it in her face. My dad sat down next to me and poured milk over his cereal. Amma wiped her hands on her tool apron. "Mitchell, you best have some a those eggs. Cereal isn't any kind a breakfast." "Good morning to you, too, Amma." He smiled at her, the way I bet he did when he was a kid. She squinted at him and slammed a glass of chocolate milk next to my plate, even though I barely drank it anymore. "Doesn't look so good to me." She sniffed and started pushing a massive amount of bacon onto my plate. To Amma, I would always be six years old. "You look like the livin' dead. What you need is some brain food, to pass those examinations a yours." "Yes, ma'am." I chugged the glass of water Amma had poured for my dad. She held up her infamous wooden spoon with the hole in the middle, the One-Eyed Menace -- that's what I called it. When I was a kid, she used to chase me around the house with it if I sassed her, even though she never actually hit me with it. I ducked, to play along. "And you better pass every single one. I won't have you hangin' around that school all summer like the Pettys' kids. You're gonna get a job, like you said you would." She sniffed, waving the spoon. "Free time means free trouble, and you got heaps of that already." My dad smiled and stifled a laugh. I bet Amma had said exactly the same thing to him when he was my age. "Yes, ma'am." I heard a car honk, and the sound of way too much Beater bass, and grabbed my backpack. All I saw was the blur of the spoon behind me. I slid into the Beater and rolled down the window. Gramma had gotten her way, and Lena had come back to school a week ago, for the end of the year. I had driven all the way out to Ravenwood to take her to school on her first day back, even stopping at the Stop & Steal to get her one of their famous sticky buns, but by the time I got there Lena was already gone. Ever since then, she had been driving herself to school, so Link and I were back in the Beater. Link turned down the music, which was blasting through the car, out the windows, and down the block. "Don't you embarrass me over at that school a yours, Ethan Wate. And you turn down that music, Wesley Jefferson Lincoln! You're goin' to knock over my whole row a rutabagas with that ruckus." Link honked back at her. Amma knocked her spoon against the post, put her hands on her hips, and then softened. "You do well on those tests a yours, and maybe I'll bake you a pie." "That wouldn't be Gatlin peach, would it, ma'am?" Amma sniffed and nodded her head. "Just might be." She would never admit it, but Amma had finally developed a soft spot for Link, after all these years. Link thought it was because Amma felt sorry for his mom after her invasion-of-the- body-snatchers experience with Sarafine, but that wasn't it. She felt bad for Link. "Can't believe that boy has to live in the house with that woman. He'd be better off if he was bein' raised by wolves." That's what she'd said last week before she packed up a pecan pie for him. Link looked at me and grinned. "Best thing that ever happened to me, Lena's mom gettin' mixed up with my mom. Never had so much a Amma's pie in my life." It was about as much as he ever said about Lena's nightmare of a birthday anymore. He floored it, and the Beater went skidding down the road. It almost wasn't worth mentioning that we were late, as usual. "Did you study for English?" It wasn't really a question. I knew Link hadn't cracked a book since seventh grade. "Nah. I'm gonna copy offa someone." "Who?" "What do you care? Somebody smarter than you." "Yeah? Last time you copied off Jenny Masterson, and you both got D's." "I didn't have time to study. I was writin' a song. We might play it at the county fair. Check it out." Link sang along with the song, which sounded weird because he was singing along to a recording of his own voice. "Lollipop Girl, took off without a word, was callin' out your name, but you never heard." Great. Another song about Ridley. Which shouldn't have surprised me, since he hadn't written a song about anything but Ridley for four months now. I was beginning to think he would always be hung up on Lena's cousin, who was nothing like her. Ridley was a Siren, who used her Power of Persuasion to get what she wanted with one lick of a lollipop. Which, for a while, was Link. Even though she had used him and disappeared, he hadn't forgotten her. But I couldn't blame him. It was probably tough being in love with a Dark Caster. It was pretty tough sometimes with a Light one, too. I was still thinking about Lena, despite the deafening roar in my ears, until Link's voice was drowned out altogether, and I heard Seventeen Moons. Only now the words had changed.

Seventeen moons, seventeen turns, Eyes so dark and bright it burns, Time is high but one is higher, Draws the moon into the fire ... Time is high? What did that even mean? It wasn't going to be Lena's Seventeenth Moon for eight more months. Why was time high now? And who was the one, and what was the fire? I felt Link smack the side of my head, and the song disappeared. He was shouting over his demo tape. "If I can get the backbeat down, it'll be a pretty rockin' tune." I stared at him, and he knocked me in the head again. "Shake it off, man. It's just an exam. You look as crazy as Miss Luney, the hot-lunch lady." Thing is, he wasn't that far off. When the Beater pulled into the Jackson High parking lot, it still didn't feel like the last day of school. For the seniors, it wasn't. They would have graduation tomorrow, and a party that lasted all night and usually gave more than a few people a

brush with alcohol poisoning. But for us sophomores and juniors, we had one more exam until we were free. Savannah and Emily walked past Link and me, ignoring us. Their short skirts were even shorter than usual, and we could see bikini strings hanging out from under their tank tops. Tie-dye and pink gingham. "Check it out. Bikini season." Link grinned. I had almost forgotten. We were only an exam away from an afternoon at the lake. Everyone who was anyone was wearing bathing suits under their clothes today, since summer didn't officially start until you had taken your first swim off the shores of Lake Moultrie. Kids from Jackson had a place we hung out, up past Monck's Corner, where the lake opened deep and wide into what felt like an ocean when you were swimming in it. Except for all the catfish and the swamp weeds, you could be out to sea. This time last year, I rode to the lake in the back of Emory's brother's truck with Emily, Savannah, Link, and half the basketball team. But that was last year. "You goin'?" "Nah." "I've got an extra suit in the Beater, but it's not as cool as these puppies." Link pulled up his shirt so I could see his bathing suit, which was bright orange and yellow plaid. About as low-key as Link was. "I'll pass." He knew why I wasn't going, but I wouldn't say it. I had to act like things were okay. Like Lena and I were okay. Link wasn't giving up today. "I'm sure Emily's savin' you half her towel." It was a joke, because we both knew she wasn't. Even the pity parade had moved on, along with the hate campaign. I guess we were such easy targets these days, the sport was gone, like shooting fish in a barrel. "Give it a rest." Link stopped walking and put his hand up to stop me. I shoved his hand away before he could start talking. I knew what he was going to say, and as far as I was concerned, the conversation was over before it started. "Come on. I know her uncle died. Quit actin' like you're both still at the funeral. I know you love her, but ..." He didn't want to say it, even though we were both thinking it. He never brought it up anymore, because he was Link, and he sat at the lunch table with me when nobody else would. "Everything's fine." It was going to work out. It had to. I didn't know how to be without her. "It's hard to watch, dude. She's treatin' you like --" "Like what?" It was a challenge. I could feel my fingers curling into a fist. I was waiting for a reason, any reason. I felt like I was going to explode, that's how badly I wanted to hit something. "The way girls usually treat me." I think he was waiting for me to hit him. Maybe he even wanted me to, if it would've helped. He shrugged. I uncurled my fingers. Link was Link, whether or not I felt like kicking his butt sometimes. "Sorry, man." Link laughed a little, taking off down the hall a little faster than usual. "No problem, Psycho." As I walked up the steps toward inevitable doom, I felt a familiar pang of loneliness. Maybe Link was right. I didn't know how much longer things could go on like this with Lena. Nothing was the same. If Link could see it, maybe it was time to face facts. My stomach started to ache, and I grabbed my side, as if I could squeeze out the pain with my hands.

Where are you, L? I slid into my desk just as the bell rang. Lena was sitting in the seat next to mine, on the Good-Eye Side, like she always had. But she didn't look like herself. She was wearing one of those white V-neck undershirts that was too big, and a black skirt, a few inches shorter than she would've ever worn three months ago. You could barely see it under the shirt, which was Macon's. I almost didn't notice anymore. She also wore his ring, the one he used to twist on his finger when he was thinking, on a chain around her neck. It hung on a new chain, right next to my mother's ring. The old chain had broken the night of her birthday, lost somewhere in the ash. I had given her my mom's ring out of love, though I wasn't sure it felt like that to her now. Whatever the reason, Lena loyally carried our ghosts with her, hers and mine, refusing to take off either one. My lost mother and her lost uncle, caught in circles of gold and platinum and other precious metals, hanging above her charm necklace and hidden in layers of cotton that didn't belong to her. Mrs. English was already passing out the tests, and she didn't look amused that half the class was wearing a bathing suit or carrying a beach towel. Emily was doing both. "Five short answers, ten points each, multiple-choice, twenty-five points, and the essay, twenty-five. Sorry, no Boo Radley this time. We're covering Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's not summer yet, people." We had been reading To Kill a

Mockingbird in the fall. I remembered the first time Lena had shown up for class, carrying her own broken-in copy. "Boo Radley's dead, Mrs. English. Stake through the heart." I don't know who said it, one of the girls sitting in the back with Emily, but we all knew she was talking about Macon. The comment was meant for Lena, just like old times. I tensed up as the ripple of laughter died down. I was waiting for the windows to shatter or something, but there wasn't even a crack. Lena didn't react. Maybe she wasn't listening, or she didn't care what they said anymore. "I bet Old Man Ravenwood isn't even in the town graveyard. That coffin's probably empty. If there is one." The voice was loud enough for Mrs. English to direct her eye toward the back of the room. "Shut up, Emily," I hissed. This time, Lena turned around and looked right at Emily. That's all it took -- one look. Emily opened her test, like she had any idea what Jekyll and Hyde was about. No one wanted to take on Lena. They just wanted to talk about her. Lena was the new Boo Radley. I wondered what Macon would have had to say about that. I was still wondering, when I heard a scream from the back of the room. "Fire! Someone help!" Emily was holding her test, and it was burning up in her hand. She dropped the test on the linoleum floor and kept screaming. Mrs. English picked up her sweater off the back of her chair, walked to the back of the room, and swiveled so she could use her good eye. Three good slaps and the fire was out, leaving a charred and smoking test in the charred and smoking spot on the floor. "I swear, it was some kinda spot-aneous combustion. It just started burnin' while I was writin'." Mrs. English picked up a shiny black lighter from the center of Emily's desk. "Really? pack up your things. You can explain it all to Principal Harper." Emily stormed out the door while Mrs. English marched to the front of the classroom. As she passed me, I noticed the lighter was emblazoned with a silver crescent moon. Lena turned back to her own test and started writing. I stared at the baggy white undershirt, her necklace jingling beneath it. Her hair was up, twisted into a weird knot, another new preference she never bothered to explain. I poked her with my pencil. She stopped writing and looked up at me, curving her mouth into a crooked half-smile, which was about the best she could do these days. I smiled back at her, but she looked down at her test, as if she would rather consider assonance and consonance than look at me. Like it actually hurt to look at me -- or, worse, she just didn't want to. When the bell rang, Jackson High turned into Mardi Gras. Girls peeled off their tank tops and went running through the parking lot in their bikini tops. Lockers were emptied, notebooks dumped into the trash. Talking turned into shouting, then screaming, as sophomores turned into juniors and juniors into seniors. Everyone finally had what they'd been waiting for all year -- freedom, and a fresh start. Everyone but me. Lena and I walked to the parking lot. Her bag swung as she walked, and we brushed against each other. I felt the electricity from months ago, but it was still cold. She stepped to the side, avoiding me. "So, how'd you do?" I was trying to make conversation, as if we were total strangers. "What?" "The English final." "I probably failed it. I didn't really do any of the reading." It was hard to imagine Lena not doing the reading for class, considering she had answered every question for months when we read To Kill a Mockingbird. "Yeah? I aced it. I stole a copy of the test off Mrs. English's desk last week." It was a lie. I would have failed before I cheated in the House of Amma. But Lena wasn't listening anyway. I waved my hand in front of her eyes. "L? Are you listening to me?" I wanted to talk to her about the dream, but first I had to get her to notice I was here. "Sorry. I have a lot on my mind." She looked away. It wasn't much, but it was more than I'd gotten out of her in weeks. "Like what?" She hesitated. "Nothing."

Nothing good? Or nothing you can talk about here? She stopped walking and turned to face me, refusing to let me in. "We're leaving Gatlin. All of us." "What?" I hadn't seen this coming. Which must have been what she wanted. She was shutting me out so I couldn't see inside, where things were happening, where she hid the feelings she didn't want to share. I kept thinking she just needed time. I didn't realize it was time away from me. "I didn't want to tell you. It's only for a few months." "Does it have anything to do with --" The familiar panic in my stomach dropped like a stone. "It has nothing to do with her." Lena looked down. "Gramma and Aunt Del think if I get away from Ravenwood, I might think about it less. About him less."

If I get away from you . That's what I heard. "It doesn't work like that, Lena." "What?" "You aren't going to forget Macon by running away." She tensed at the mention of his name. "Yeah? Is that what your books say? Where am I? Stage five? Six, tops?" "Is that what you think?" "Here's a stage for you. Leave it all behind and get away while you still can. When do I get to that one?" I stopped walking and looked at her. "Is that what you want?" She twisted her charm necklace on the long silver chain, touching the littlest bits of us, the things we had done and seen together. She twisted it so tight, I thought for a minute it would snap. "I don't know. Part of me wants to leave and never come back, and part of me can't bear to go because he loved Ravenwood and left it to me."

Is that the only reason? I waited for her to finish -- to say she didn't want to leave me. But she didn't. I changed the subject. "Maybe that's why we're dreaming about that night." "What are you talking about?" I had her attention. "The dream we had last night, about your birthday. I mean, it seemed like your birthday except for the part when Sarafine killed me. It seemed so real. I even woke up with this." I held up my shirt. Lena stared at the raised pink scar, creating a jagged line across my abdomen. She looked like she was going to pass out. Her face went pale, her expression panicked. It was the first time I had seen any kind of emotion in her eyes in weeks. "I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't have a dream last night." There was something about the way she said it, and the look on her face. She was serious. "That's weird. Usually we both do." I tried to sound calm, but I could feel my heart starting to pound. We had been having the same dreams since before we met. They were the reason for Macon's midnight visits to my room -- to take the pieces of my dreams he didn't want Lena to see. Macon had said our connection was so strong that Lena dreamed my dreams. What did it say about our connection if she couldn't anymore? "It was the night of your birthday, and I heard you calling me. But when I got to the top of the crypt, Sarafine was there and she had a knife."

Lena looked like she was going to be sick. I probably should have stopped there, but I couldn't. I had to keep pushing, and I didn't even know why. "What happened that night, L? You never really told me. Maybe that's why I'm dreaming about it now."

Ethan, I can't. Don't make me. I couldn't believe it. There she was back in my mind, Kelting again. I tried to crack open the door, an inch further, and get back into hers.

We can talk about this. You have to talk to me. Whatever Lena was feeling, she shook it off. I felt the door between our minds slam shut. "You know what happened. You fell, trying to climb onto the crypt, and you were knocked out." "But what happened to Sarafine?" She tugged on the strap of her bag. "I don't know. There was fire everywhere, remember?" "And she just disappeared?" "I don't know. I couldn't see anything, and by the time the fire died down, she was gone." Lena sounded defensive, as if I was accusing her of something. "Why are you making such a big deal about this? You had a dream, and I didn't. So what? It's not like the others. It doesn't mean anything." She started to walk away. I stepped in front of her and lifted my shirt again. "Then how do you explain this?" The jagged outline of the scar was still pink and newly healed. Lena's eyes were wide, catching the sunlight of the first day of summer. In the sun, her hazel eyes seemed to glint with gold. She didn't say a word. "And the song -- it's changing. I know you hear it, too. Time is high? Are we going to talk about that?" She started backing away from me, which I guess was her answer. But I didn't care and it didn't matter, because I couldn't stop myself. "Something's happening, isn't it?" She shook her head. "What is it? Lena --" Before I could say anything else, Link caught up to us, snapping me with his towel. "Looks like nobody's goin' to the lake today, except maybe you two." "What do you mean?" "Look at the tires, oh Whipped One. They're all slashed, every car in the lot, even the Beater." "Every car?" Fatty, Jackson's truant officer, would be all over this. I calculated the number of cars in the lot. Enough to get the whole mess kicked up to Summerville, maybe even the sheriff's office. This was out of Fatty's league. "Every car except Lena's." Link pointed at the Fastback in the parking lot. I still had trouble getting my head around the idea that it was Lena's car. The lot was in total chaos. Savannah was on her cell phone. Emily was screaming at Eden Westerly. The basketball team was going nowhere. Link bumped his shoulder against Lena's. "I don't really blame you for the rest a them, but did you have to get the Beater? I'm a little short on cash for new tires." I looked at her. She was transfixed.

Lena, did you? "It wasn't me." Something was wrong. The old Lena would have bitten our heads off for even asking. "You think it was Ridley or --" I looked over at Link. I didn't want to say Sarafine's name. Lena shook her head. "It wasn't Ridley." She didn't sound like herself, or sure of herself. "She's not the only one who hates Mortals, believe it or not." I looked at her, but it was Link who said the one thing we were both thinking. "How do you know?" "I just do." Over the chaos of the parking lot, a motorcycle gunned its engine. A guy in a black T-shirt swerved through the parked cars, blowing exhaust into the faces of angry cheerleaders, and disappeared out onto the road. He was wearing a helmet, so you couldn't see his face. Just his Harley. But my stomach balled itself up, because the motorcycle looked familiar. Where had I seen it before? Nobody at Jackson had a motorcycle. The closest thing was Hank Porter's ATV, which hadn't worked since he rolled it after Savannah's last party. Or so I'd heard, now that I no longer made the guest list. Lena stared after the motorcycle as if she had seen a ghost. "Let's get out of here." She headed for her car, practically running down the stairs. "Where to?" I tried to catch up to her, Link jogging behind me. "Anywhere but here."

6.12

The Lake

If it wasn't Ridley, why weren't your tires slashed?" I pushed again. What happened in the parking lot didn't make sense, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Or the motorcycle. Why did I recognize it? Lena ignored me, looking out at the water. "It's probably a coincidence." Neither of us believed in coincidences. "Yeah?" I grabbed a handful of sand, brown and gritty. Except for Link, we had the lake to ourselves. Everyone else was probably lined up at the BP trying to buy new tires before Ed ran out. In another town, you might have put your shoes back on and called the sand dirt and this part of our lake a swamp, but the murky water of Lake Moultrie was the closest thing Gatlin had to a swimming pool. Everyone hung out on the northern shore because it was on the edge of the woods and a hike from the cars, so you never ran into anyone who wasn't in high school -- especially not your parents. I didn't know why we were here. It was weird to have the lake to ourselves, since the whole school had planned to be here today. I hadn't believed Lena when she told me she wanted to come. But she did, and we had, and now Link was thrashing around in the water, and we were sharing a dirty towel Link had grabbed out of the back of the Beater before we left. Lena turned over next to me. For a minute, it seemed like everything was back to normal and she wanted to be there on my towel. But that only lasted until the silence set in. I could see her pale skin glistening under the thin white undershirt, which was sticking to her in the suffocating heat and humidity of a June South Carolina day. The sound of the cicadas chirping almost drowned out the awkward silence. Almost. Lena's black skirt was riding low on her hips. I wished we had our bathing suits for the hundredth time. I'd never seen Lena in one. I tried not to think about it.

Did you forget I can hear you? I raised an eyebrow. There she was again. Back in my mind, twice in one day, as if she'd never left. One minute she was barely speaking to me, and the next she acted like nothing had changed between us at all. I knew we should talk about it, but I didn't want to fight anymore.

Not like there'd be anything forgettable about you in a bikini, L. She leaned closer, pulling my faded shirt over my head. I could feel a few stray curls of her hair brushing against my shoulders. She slid her arm around my neck and pulled me closer. Face to face, I could see the sun glinting gold in her eyes. I didn't remember them looking so gold. She tossed my shirt in my face and took off running for the water, laughing like a little kid as she jumped into the lake, still wearing her clothes. I hadn't seen her laugh or joke around in months. It was like I had her back for an afternoon, even if I didn't know why. I pushed it out of my mind and chased her, running into the water and across the shallow edge of the lake. "Stop it!" Lena splashed me, and I splashed her back. Her clothes were dripping, and my shorts were dripping, but it felt good to be out in the sun. In the distance, Link was swimming out to the dock. We were really alone. "L, wait up." She smiled over her shoulder and dove under the water. "You're not getting away that easy." I grabbed her leg before it disappeared and yanked her toward me. She laughed and kicked, twisting until I fell into the water next to her. "I think I felt a fish," she squealed. I pulled her waist into mine. We were face to face, nothing but sun, and water, and the two of us. There was no avoiding each other now. "I don't want you to leave. I want things to be like they were. Can't we go back, you know, to how it used to --" Lena reached out and touched my lips with her hand. "Shh." Warmth spread from the tip of her finger down across my shoulders and into my body. I had almost forgotten that feeling, the heat and the electricity. She moved her hands down my arms and clenched them behind my back, laying her head against my chest. It felt like steam was rising off my skin, prickling where she touched me. I hadn't been this close to her in weeks. I inhaled deeply. Lemons and rosemary ... and something else. Something different.

I love you, L. I know. Lena lifted her face to mine, and I kissed her. Within seconds, she disappeared into my arms, in a way she hadn't in months. The kiss began to move us involuntarily, as if we were under some kind of Cast all our own. I picked her up and lifted her out of the water, her legs dangling over my arms, the water pouring off us. I carried her back to the towel, and we were rolling in the dirty sand. Our warmth turned into fire. I knew we were out of control, and we had to stop.

L. Lena gasped under the weight of my body, and we rolled again. I tried to catch my breath. She threw her head back and laughed, and a chill ran up my back. I remembered that laugh, straight out of my dream. It was Sarafine's laugh. Lena sounded exactly like her.

Lena. Was I imagining it? Before I could make sense of it, she was on top of me and I couldn't think about anything else. I was lost in seconds, tangled up in her. My chest tightened, and I felt my breath growing short. I knew if we didn't stop soon, I'd end up in the emergency room, or worse.

Lena! I felt a searing pain cut through my lip. I pushed her off and rolled over, stunned. Lena slid away from me in the dirt, backing onto her heels. Her eyes were glowing, gold and huge. Barely a trace of green. She was breathing hard. I doubled over, trying to catch my breath. Every raw nerve in my body had been lit on fire, one match at a time. Lena raised her head, and I could hardly see her face through the wild mess of dirt and hair. Just the strange golden glow. "Get away from me." She spoke slowly, as if each word was coming from a deep, untouchable place within her. Link was out of the water, rubbing a towel on his spiky hair. He looked ridiculous in the same plastic goggles his mom made him wear when we were little. "Did I miss somethin'?" I touched my lip, wincing, and looked at my fingers. Blood. Lena rose to her feet, backing away from us.

I could have killed you. She turned and bolted into the trees. "Lena!" I took off after her. Running through the South Carolina woods barefoot is not something I recommend. We'd been in a drought, and the shoreline around the lake was littered with dry cypress needles, which bit into my feet like a thousand tiny knives. But I kept running. I could hear Lena more than see her, as she crashed through the trees in front of me.

Get away from me! A heavy pine branch splintered and cracked without warning, smashing across the trail a few feet in front of me. I could already hear another branch groaning ahead.

L, are you crazy? Branches were falling around me, missing me by inches. Far enough away so they didn't hit me, but close enough to make a point.

Stop it! Don't follow me, Ethan! Leave me alone! As the gap between us widened, I sped up. Tree trunks and scrub brush flashed past me. Lena was swerving around the trees, not following any distinct path. She was heading for the highway. Another tree fell in front of me, catching horizontally on the trunks of the trees on either side of me. I was momentarily trapped. There was an osprey nest upside down in the broken tree. Something Lena, in her right mind, would never have dreamed of hurting. I touched the twigs, checking for broken eggs. I heard the sound of a motorcycle, and my stomach caved in on itself. I shoved my way under the branches. My face was scratched and bloody, but I made it out to the highway in time to see Lena climb on the back of a Harley.

What are you doing, L? She looked back at me for a second. Then she disappeared down the highway, black hair flying behind her.

Getting away from here. Her pale arms were clinging to the biker from the Jackson High parking lot, the tire slasher. The motorcycle. I finally remembered. It had been in one of Lena's graveyard pictures, the one that vanished from her wall right after I asked about it. She wouldn't jump on the back of some random guy's bike. Not unless she knew him. Right then, I didn't know which was worse.

6.12

Caster Boy

Link and I didn't talk much on the way back from the lake. We had to take Lena's car, but I was in no shape to drive. My feet were cut up, and I had messed up my ankle trying to climb over that last tree. Link didn't mind. He was enjoying his turn behind the wheel of the Fastback. "Man, this thing can haul. Pony power, Baby." Link's usual worship of the Fastback was annoying today. My head was spinning and I didn't want to hear about Lena's car for the hundredth time. "Then speed it up, man. We have to find her. She's hitchhiking on the back of some guy's motorcycle." I couldn't tell him the odds were she knew the guy. When had she taken that picture of the Harley in the graveyard? I punched the door in frustration. Link didn't state the obvious. Lena ran away from me. It was pretty clear she didn't want to be found. He just drove, and I stared out the window of the passenger's seat as the hot wind stung the hundreds of tiny cuts on my face. Something had been wrong for a while now. I just didn't want to face it. I wasn't sure if it was something that had been done to us, I had done to her, or she had done to me. Maybe it was something she was doing to herself. Her birthday was when it all started, her birthday and Macon's death. I wondered if it was Sarafine. All this time, I'd been thinking this was about those stupid stages of grief. I thought about the gold in her eyes and the laugh from the dream. What if this was about different kinds of stages, stages of something else? Something supernatural? Something Dark? What if this was what we'd been afraid of all along? I hit the door again. "I'm sure Lena's okay. She probably needs some space. Girls are always talkin' about needin' space." Link turned on the radio, then turned it off again. "Killer stereo." "Whatever." "Hey, we should go by the Dar-ee Keen and see if Charlotte's workin'. Maybe she can hook us up. Especially if we show up in this sweet ride." Link was trying to distract me, but it wasn't going to happen. "Like there's a person in town who doesn't know whose car this is? We should drop it off, anyway. Aunt Del will be worried." It would also give me an excuse to see if the Harley was at Lena's house. Link persisted. "You're goin' to show up with Lena's car without Lena? Like that won't worry Aunt Del? Let's stop and get a freeze and figure this out. Who knows, maybe Lena's at the Dar-ee Keen. It's right off the highway." He was right, but it didn't make me feel any better. It made me feel worse. "If you like the Dar-ee Keen so much, you should have gotten a job there. Oh wait, you couldn't, because you'll be in summer school dissecting frogs with the other Lifers who failed bio." Lifers were the super seniors, the ones who always seemed to be at school and yet somehow never graduated. The guys who wore their letterman jackets years later, when they were working at the Stop & Steal. "You should talk. Could you have a lamer summer job? The library?" "I could hook you up with a book, but you'd have to learn to read." Link was baffled by my summer plans to work at the library with Marian, but I didn't mind. I was still full of questions about Lena, her family, and Light and Dark Casters. Why didn't Lena have to Claim herself on her sixteenth birthday? It didn't seem like the kind of thing you could get out of. Could she really choose to be Light or Dark? Was it that easy? Since The Book of Moons was destroyed in the fire, the Lunae Libri was the only place that might have the answers. Then there were the other questions. I tried not to think about my mother. I tried not to think about strangers on motorcycles and nightmares and bloody lips and golden eyes. Instead, I stared out the window and watched the trees pass by in a blur. The Dar-ee Keen was packed. Not a big surprise, since it was one of the only places within walking distance of Jackson High. In the summer, you could pretty much follow the trail of flies and you would eventually find your way here. Formerly the Dairy King, the place had gotten a new name after the Gentrys bought it but didn't want to fork up the money to pay to put all new letters on the sign. Today everyone looked even sweatier and more pissed off than usual. Walking a mile in the South Carolina heat and missing the first day of hooking up and drinking warm beer at the lake wasn't anyone's idea of a good time. It was like canceling a national holiday. Emily, Savannah, and Eden were hanging out at the good table in the corner with the basketball team. They were barefoot, in their bikini tops and supershort jean skirts -- the kind with one button left open, offering up a powerful flash of bikini bottoms without ever completely falling off. Nobody was in a very good mood. There wasn't a tire left in Gatlin, so half the cars were still sitting in the school parking lot. All the same, there was plenty of loud giggling and hair flipping. Emily was spilling out of her string bikini top, and Emory, her latest victim, was loving it. Link shook his head. "Man, those two wanna be the bride at the weddin' and the corpse at the funeral." "Just so long as I'm not invited to either." "Dude. You need some sugar. I'm gonna get in line. You want somethin'?" "No, thanks. You need some money?" Link never had any money. "Naw, I'm gonna get Charlotte to hook me up." Link could talk his way into and out of almost anything. I pushed my way through the crowd, as far away from Emily and Savannah as I could get. I slumped down at the bad corner table, beneath the shelves of soda cans and bottles from around the country. Some of the sodas had been there since my dad was little, and you could see the different levels of brown and orange and red syrup, disappearing to the bottom of the bottles from years of evaporation. It was pretty disgusting, I guess, that and the fifties soda bottle wallpaper and the flies. After a while, you didn't even notice it anymore. I sat down and looked at the disappearing dark syrup, my mood in a bottle. What happened to Lena back at the lake? One minute we were kissing, the next she was running away from me. All that gold in her eyes. I wasn't stupid. I knew what it meant. Light Casters had green eyes. Dark Casters had gold. Lena's weren't completely gold, but what I'd seen at the lake was enough to make me wonder. A fly landed on the shiny red table, and I stared at it. I recognized the familiar churning in my stomach. Dread and panic, all turning into a dull anger. I was so mad at Lena, I wanted to kick out the glass window next to our booth. But at the same time, I wanted to know what was going on and who that guy on the Harley was. Then I'd have to kick his ass. Link slid into the booth across from me with the biggest freeze I'd ever seen. The ice cream rose about four inches above where the plastic cup ended. "Charlotte has some real potential." Link licked the straw. Even the sugary smell of the freeze was making me sick. I felt like the sweat and the grease and the flies and the Emorys and Emilys were closing in on me. "Lena's not here. We should go." I couldn't sit around like everything was normal. Link, on the other hand, could. Rain or shine. "Chillax. I'll suck it down in five." Eden walked by on her way to refill her Diet Coke. She smiled down at us, as fake as ever. "What a cute couple. See, Ethan, you didn't need to be wastin' time with that lil' tire slasher window basher. You and Link, y'all lovebirds were meant for each other." "She didn't slash your tires, Eden." I knew how this was going to look for Lena. I had to shut them down before their mothers got involved. "Yeah. I did," Link said, his mouth full of ice cream. "Lena's just bummed she didn't think of it first." He could never resist the chance to harass the cheer squad. To them, Lena was an old joke that wasn't funny anymore but nobody could drop. That was the thing about small towns. No one ever changed their opinion of you, even if you changed. As far as they were concerned, even when Lena was a great-grandmother, she would still be the crazy girl who busted out the window in English class. Considering most of our English class would still be living in Gatlin. Not me. Not if things were going to stay like this. It was the first time I had really thought about leaving since Lena came to Gatlin. The box of college brochures under my bed had stayed under my bed until now. As long as I had Lena, I wasn't counting the days until I could get out of Gatlin. "Hell-o. Who is that?" Eden's voice was a little too loud. I heard the bell on the door of the Dar-ee Keen chime as it closed. It was like some kind of Clint Eastwood movie, where the hero steps into the saloon after he's just shot up the whole town. The neck of every girl sitting near us snapped toward the door, greasy blond ponytails flying. "I don't know, but I'd sure like to find out," Emily purred, coming up behind Eden. "I've never seen him before. Have you?" I could see Savannah filing through the yearbook in her mind. "No way. I'd remember him." Poor guy. Emily had him in her crosshairs, target locked and loaded. He didn't stand a chance, whoever he was. I turned around to get a look at the guy Earl and Emory would be kicking the crap out of when they realized their girlfriends were drooling over him. He was standing in the doorway in a faded black T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed black army boots. I couldn't see the scuffs from where I was sitting, but I knew they were there. Because he was wearing exactly the same thing the last time I saw him, when he ripped out of Macon's funeral. It was the stranger, the Incubus who wasn't an Incubus. The sunlight Incubus. I remembered the silver sparrow in Lena's hand when she was sleeping in my bed. What was he doing here? A black tattoo wound around his arm, sort of tribal-looking, like something I'd seen before. I felt a knife in my gut, and touched my scar. It was throbbing. Savannah and Emily walked up to the counter, trying to act like they were going to order something, as if they touched anything here other than Diet Coke. "Who is that?" Link wasn't one for competition, not that he was in the running these days. "I don't know, but he showed up at Macon's funeral." Link was staring at him. "Is he one of Lena's weird relatives?" "I don't know what he is, but he isn't related to Lena." Then again, he did come to the funeral to pay his respects to Macon. Still, there was something wrong about him. I'd sensed it since the first time I saw him. I heard the bell chime again as the door closed. "Hey, Angel Face, wait up." I froze. I would have known that voice anywhere. Link was staring at the door, too. He looked like he'd seen a ghost, or worse.... Ridley. Lena's Dark Caster of a cousin was as dangerous and hot and barely dressed as always, except now it was summer, so she had on even less than usual. She was wearing a skin-tight, lacy black tank and a black skirt so small it was probably made for a ten-year-old. Ridley's legs looked longer than ever, balancing on some kind of high, spiky sandals that could stake a vampire. Now the girls weren't the only ones with their mouths hanging open. Most of the school had been at the winter formal, when Ridley brought down the house and still managed to look hotter than any girl there except one. Ridley leaned back and stretched her arms over her head, as if we'd woken her from a long nap. She laced her fingers together, stretching even higher, revealing even more skin and the black tattoo encircling her navel. Her tattoo looked a lot like the one on her friend's arm. Ridley whispered something in his ear. "Holy crap, she's here." Link was slowly absorbing it. He hadn't seen Ridley since the night of Lena's birthday, when he had talked Ridley out of killing my dad. But he didn't need to see her to think about her. It was pretty clear he'd been thinking about her a lot, based on every song he'd written since she left. "She's with that guy? Do you think he's, you know, like her?" A Dark Caster. He couldn't say it. "Doubt it. His eyes aren't yellow." But he was something. I just didn't know what. "They're comin' over here." Link looked down at his freeze, and Ridley was on us. "Well, if it isn't two of my favorite people. Fancy meeting you here. John and I were dying for a drink." Ridley tossed her blond and pink strands over her shoulder. She slid into the booth across from us and motioned for the guy to sit down. He didn't. "John Breed." He said it like it was one name, looking right at me. His eyes were as green as Lena's used to be. What would a Light Caster be doing with Ridley? Ridley smiled at him. "This is Lena's, you know, the one I was telling you about." She dismissed me with a wave of her purple-polished fingers. "I'm Lena's boyfriend, Ethan."

John looked confused, but only for a second. He was the kind of guy who looked relaxed, as if he knew everything would go his way eventually. "Lena never told me she had a boyfriend." Every muscle in my body tightened. He knew Lena, but I didn't know him. He had seen her since the funeral, at least talked to her. When had that happened, and why hadn't she told me? "How exactly do you know my girlfriend?" My voice was too loud, and I could feel the eyes on us. "Relax, Short Straw. We were in the neighborhood." Ridley looked across at Link. "How ya been, Hot Rod?" Link cleared his throat awkwardly. "Good." His voice came out kind of squeaky. "I've been real good. Thought you left town." Ridley didn't answer. I was still looking at John, and he was staring right back, sizing me up. Probably figuring out a thousand ways to get rid of me. Because he was after something -- or someone -- and I was in his way. Ridley wouldn't just show up here with this guy now, not after four months. I kept my eyes on him. "Ridley, you shouldn't be here." "Don't get your panties in a twist, Boyfriend. We're just passin' through, on our way back from Ravenwood." She said it casually, like it wasn't a big deal. I laughed. "Ravenwood? They wouldn't let you in the door. Lena would burn the house down first." Ridley and Lena had grown up together, like sisters, until Ridley went Dark. Ridley had helped Sarafine find Lena on her birthday, which almost got us all, including my father, killed. There was no way Lena would hang out with her. She smiled. "Times have changed, Short Straw. I'm not on the best terms with the rest of my family, but Lena and I have worked things out. Why don't you ask her?" "You're lying." Ridley unwrapped a cherry lollipop, which looked innocent enough but was the ultimate weapon in her hands. "You clearly have trust issues. I'd love to help you with that, but we've gotta get going. Have to fill up John's bike before that hick gas station of yours runs out of gas." I was holding the side of the table, and my knuckles went white.

His bike. It was sitting out front right now, and I bet it was a Harley. The same bike I had seen in the photograph on the wall of Lena's room. John Breed had picked up Lena from Lake Moultrie. And before he said another word, I knew John Breed wasn't about to disappear. He'd be waiting on the corner the next time Lena needed a ride. I stood up. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but Link was. He slid out of the booth and shoved me toward the door. "Let's get outta here, man." Ridley called after us. "I really did miss you, Shrinky Dink." She tried to make it sound sarcastic, like one of her jokes. But the sarcasm stuck in her throat, and it came out sounding more like the truth. I slammed my palm against the door, sending it flying open. But before it swung shut, I heard John's voice. "Nice to meet you, Ethan. Say hi to Lena for me." My hands were shaking, and I heard Ridley laugh. She didn't have to lie to hurt me today. She had the truth. We didn't talk on the way to Ravenwood. Neither one of us knew what to say. Girls can do that to you, especially Caster girls. When we reached the top of the long drive leading to Ravenwood Manor, the gates were closed, something I'd never seen before. The ivy had grown over the twisting metal, as if it had always been there. I got out of the car and shook the gate to see if it would swing open, knowing it wouldn't. I looked up at the house behind it. The windows were dark, and the sky over the house looked even darker. What had happened? I could've handled Lena's freak-out at the lake and feeling like she had to take off. But why him? Why the Caster boy with the Harley? How long had she been hanging out with him without telling me? And what did Ridley have to do with it? I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out. "You okay, man?" Link slammed the driver's side door. "No." I looked down the long driveway ahead of us. "Me neither." Link tossed the key through the Fastback's open window, and we headed down the hill. We hitched back to town, Link turning every few minutes to check the stretch of road behind us for a Harley. But I didn't think we'd see it. That particular Harley wouldn't be headed into town. For all I knew, it could be inside those gates already. I didn't come down for dinner, which was my first mistake. My second was opening the black Converse shoe box. I shook it open, the contents spilling across my bed. A note Lena had written me on the back of a wrinkled Snickers wrapper, a ticket stub from the movie we saw on our first date, a faded receipt from the Dar-ee Keen, and a highlighted page ripped out of a book that had reminded me of her. It was the box where I stashed all our memories -- my version of Lena's necklace. It didn't seem like the kind of thing a guy should do, so I didn't let on that I did it, not even to her. I picked up the crumpled photo from the winter formal, taken the second before we were doused with liquid snow by my so-called friends. The picture was blurry, but we were captured in a kiss, so happy it was hard to look at now. Remembering that night, even though I knew the next moment was going to be awful, it felt like part of me was still back there kissing her. "Ethan Wate, is that you?" I tried to shove everything back into the box when I heard my door opening, and the box fell, scattering everything onto the floor. "You feelin' all right?" Amma came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed. She hadn't done that since I'd had stomach flu in sixth grade. Not that she didn't love me. We just had things worked out in a way that didn't include sitting on beds. "I'm tired, that's all." She looked at the mess on the floor. "You look lower than a catfish at the bottom a the river. And a perfectly good pork chop's lookin' as sorry as you are, down in my kitchen. That's two kinds a sorry." She leaned forward and brushed my brown hair out of my eyes. She was always after me to cut my hair. "I know, I know. The eyes are the window to the soul, and I need a haircut." "You need a good sight more than a haircut." She looked sad and grabbed my chin as if she could lift me up by it. Given the right circumstances, I bet she could. "You're not right." "I'm not?" "You're not, and you're my boy, and it's my fault." "What do you mean?" I didn't understand and she didn't elaborate, which was generally how our conversations went. "She's not right either, you know." Amma spoke softly, looking out my window. "Not bein' right isn't always somebody's fault. Sometimes it's just a fact, like the cards you pull." With Amma, everything came down to fate, the cards in her tarot deck, the bones in the graveyard, the universe she could read. "Yes, ma'am." She looked into my eyes, and I could see hers shining. "Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and even a Seer can't tell what's comin'." She took my hand and dropped something into it. A red string with tiny beads knotted into it, one of her charms. "Tie it 'round your wrist." "Amma, guys don't wear bracelets." "Since when do I make jewelry? That's for women with too much time and not enough sense." She yanked on her apron, straightening it. "A red string's a tie to the Otherworld, offers the kinda protection I can't. Go on, put it on." I knew better than to argue when Amma had that look on her face. It was a mixture of fear and sadness, and she wore it like a burden too heavy for her to carry. I held out my arm and let her tie the string around my wrist. Before I could say anything else, she was at my window, pouring a handful of salt from her apron pocket all along the sill. "Everything's gonna be okay, Amma. Don't worry." Amma stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, rubbing the shine out of her eyes. "Been choppin' onions all afternoon." Something wasn't right, like Amma said. But I had a feeling it wasn't me. "You know anything about a guy named John Breed?" She stiffened. "Ethan Wate, don't you make me give that pork chop to Lucille." "No, ma'am." Amma knew something, and it wasn't good, and she wasn't talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn't have a single onion in it.

6.14

Bookworm

If it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it's good enough for me." Marian winked at me as she pulled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head. Lucille was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library's no-pets rule since the place was full of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn't speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn't being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn't know if he even still had one -- all in the space of the two longest days of his life. I still hadn't talked to Lena. I told myself it was because I was too angry, but that was one of those lies you tell when you're trying to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing. The truth was, I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to ask the questions, and I was scared to hear the answers. Besides, I wasn't the one who ran off with some guy on a motorcycle. "It's chaos. Dewey decimal is mocking you. I can't even find one almanac on the history of the moon's orbital pattern." The voice from the stacks startled me. "Now, Olivia ..." Marian smiled to herself as she examined the bindings of the books in her hands. It was hard to believe she was old enough to be my mother. With not a streak of gray in her short hair, and not a wrinkle in her goldenbrown skin, she didn't look more than thirty. "Professor Ashcroft, this isn't 1876. Times do change." It was a girl's voice. She had an accent -- British, I think. I'd only heard people talk that way in James Bond movies. "So has the Dewey decimal system. Twenty-two times, to be exact." Marian shelved a stray book. "What about the Library of Congress?" The voice sounded exasperated. "Give me a hundred more years." "The Universal Decimal Classification?" Now irritated. "This is South Carolina, not Belgium." "Perhaps the Harvard-Yenching system?" "Nobody in this county speaks Chinese, Olivia." A blond, lanky girl poked her head out from behind the stacks. "Not true, Professor Ashcroft. At least, not for the summer holidays." "You speak Chinese?" I couldn't help myself. When Marian had mentioned her summer research assistant, she hadn't told me the girl would be a teenage version of herself. Except for the streaky, honey-colored hair, the pale skin, and the accent, they could have been mother and daughter. Even at first glance, the girl had a vague degree of Marian-ness that was hard to describe and that you wouldn't find in anyone else in town. The girl looked at me. "You don't?" She poked me in the ribs. "That was a joke. In my opinion, people in this country barely speak English." She smiled and held out her hand. She was tall, but I was taller, and she looked up at me as if she was already confident we were great friends. "Olivia Durand. Liv, to my friends. You must be Ethan Wate, which I find hard to believe, actually. The way Professor Ashcroft talks about you, I was expecting more of a swashbuckler, with a bayonet." Marian laughed, and I turned red. "What has she been telling you?" "Only that you're incredibly brilliant and brave and virtuous, quite the save-the-day sort. Every bit the son you would expect of the beloved Lila Evers Wate. And that you'll be my lowly assistant this summer, so I can boss you around all I like." She smiled at me, and I blanked. She was nothing like Lena, but nothing like the girls in Gatlin either. Which was in itself more than confusing. Everything she was wearing had a weathered look, from her faded jeans and the random bits of string and beads around her wrists, to her holey silver high-tops, held together with duct tape, and her ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt. She had a big, black plastic watch with crazy-looking dials on the face, caught between the bits of string. I was too embarrassed to say anything. Marian swooped in to rescue me. "Don't mind Liv. She's teasing. 'Even the gods love jokes,' Ethan." "Plato. And stop showing off." Liv laughed. "I will." Marian smiled, impressed. "He's not laughing." Liv pointed at me, suddenly serious. "'Hollow laughter in marble halls.' " "Shakespeare?" I looked at her. Liv winked and yanked on her T-shirt. "Pink Floyd. I can see you've got a lot to learn." A teenage Marian, and not at all what I expected when I signed on for a summer job in the library. "Now, children." Marian held out her hand, and I pulled her up from the floor. Even on a hot day like today, she still managed to look cool. Not a hair was out of place. Her patterned blouse rustled as she walked in front of me. "I'll leave the stacks to you, Olivia. I have a special project for Ethan in the archive." "Right, of course. The highly trained history student sorts out the stacks, while the unschooled slacker is promoted to the archive. How very American." She rolled her eyes and picked up a box of books. The archive hadn't changed since last month, when I came to ask Marian about a summer job but stayed to talk about Lena and my dad and Macon. She had been sympathetic, the way she always was. There were piles of old Civil War registries on the shelf above my mother's desk, and her collection of antique glass paperweights. A glistening, black sphere sat next to the misshapen clay apple I made for her in first grade. My mom's and Marian's books and notes were still stacked across the desk, over yellowed maps of Ravenwood and Greenbrier spread open on the tables. Every scribbled scrap of paper I saw made it feel like she was here. Even though everything in my life seemed to be going wrong, I always felt better in this place. It was like I was with my mom, and she was the one person who always knew how to fix things, or at least make me believe there was a way to fix them. But something else was on my mind. "That's your summer intern?" "Of course." "You didn't tell me she'd be like that." "Like what, Ethan?" "Like you." "Is that what's bothering you? The brains, or is it perhaps the long blond hair? Is there a certain way a librarian should look? Big glasses and hair in a graying bun? I would have thought between your mother and me, we would have disabused you of at least that notion." She was right. My mom and Marian had always been two of the most beautiful women in Gatlin. "Liv won't be here very long, and she's not much older than you are. I was thinking the least you could do would be to show her around town, introduce her to some people your age." "Like who? Link? To improve his vocabulary and kill off a few thousand of her brain cells?" I didn't mention that Link would spend most of his time trying to hook up with her, which I didn't see happening. "I was thinking of Lena." The silence in the room was embarrassing, even to me. Of course she had been thinking of Lena. The question was, why hadn't I? Marian looked at me evenly. "Why don't you tell me what's really on your mind today?" "What is it you need me to do in here, Aunt Marian?" I didn't feel like talking about it. She sighed and turned back to the archive. "I thought maybe you could help me sort through some of this. Obviously a great deal of the material in here relates to the locket and Ethan and Genevieve. Now that we know the end of that story, we might want to make some room for the next one." "What's the next one?" I picked up the old photo of Genevieve wearing the locket. I remembered the first time I looked at it with Lena. It felt like years since then, instead of months. "It would seem to me that it's yours and Lena's. The events on her birthday raised a number of questions, most of which I can't answer. I've never heard of an incident when a Caster didn't have to choose Light or Dark on the night of their Claiming -- except in the case of Lena's family, when the choice is made for them. Now that we don't have Macon to help us, I'm afraid we're going to have to search out the answers ourselves." Lucille jumped up onto my mother's chair, her ears perking up. "I wouldn't know where to start." "'He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to.' " "Thoreau?" "Harry Emerson Fosdick. A bit older and more obscure, but still quite relevant, I think." She smiled and put her hand on the edge of the door. "Aren't you going to help me?" "I can't leave Olivia alone for long, or she'll reshelve the entire collection, and then we'll all have to learn Chinese." She paused for a moment, watching me, looking so much like my mom. "I think you can handle this one on your own. At least the beginning." "I don't have a choice, do I? You can't really help me since you're a Keeper." I was still bitter about Marian's revelation that she had known my mother was involved with the Caster world, but she would never explain why or how. There were so many things about my mother and her death that Marian had never told me. It always came back to the endless rules that Bound Marian to her job as a Keeper. "I can only help you help yourself. I can't determine the course of events, the unraveling of Darkness and Light, the Order of Things." "That's such a load of crap." "What?" "It's like the prime directive on Star Trek . You have to let the planet evolve at its own pace. You can't introduce hyperspace or warp speed until they discover it for themselves. But Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise always end up breaking the rule." "Unlike Captain Kirk, there is no choice in my case. A Keeper is powerfully Bound to act neither for the Dark nor the Light. I couldn't change my destiny, even if I wanted to. I have my own place in the natural order of the Caster world, in the Order of Things." "Whatever." "It's not a choice. I don't have the authority to change the way things work. If I so much as tried, I might destroy not only myself but the very people I was trying to help." "But my mom still ended up dead." I don't know why I said it, but I couldn't understand the logic. Marian had to remain uninvolved to protect the people she cared about, but the person she cared about most died anyway. "Are you asking me if I could've prevented your mother's death?" She knew I was. I looked down at my sneakers. I wasn't sure I was ready to hear the answer. Marian put her hand under my chin and pulled my face up to meet hers. "I didn't know your mother was in danger, Ethan. But she knew the risks." Her voice was uneven, and I knew I had gone too far, but I couldn't help it. I'd been trying to get up the courage to have this conversation for months now. "I would have gladly taken her place in that car. Don't you think I have wondered a thousand times if there was something I knew or could have done that might have saved Lila ..." Her voice trailed off.

I feel the same way. You're just holding on to a different edge of the same jagged hole. We're both lost. That's what I wanted to say. Instead, I let her put her arm around my shoulder and pull me into a rough hug. I barely felt it when the arm slipped away and the door closed behind her. I stared at the stacks of paper. Lucille jumped down from the chair and onto the table. "Be careful. These are a lot older than you." She tilted her head and looked at me with her blue eyes. Then she froze. She was staring at my mother's chair, eyes wide, fixated. There was nothing there, but I remembered what Amma told me. "Cats can see the dead. That's why they stare at things the way they do for so long, like they're just lookin' into thin air. But they're not. They're lookin' through it." I stepped closer to the chair. "Mom?" She didn't answer, or maybe she did, because there was a book lying on the chair that wasn't there a minute ago. Darkness and Light: The Origins of Magic. It was one of Macon's books. I had seen it in his library at Ravenwood. I lifted it up, and a gum wrapper fell out -- one of my mother's bookmarks, no doubt. I bent down to pick up the wrapper, and the room began to sway, the lights and colors swirling around me. I tried to focus on something, anything, to keep from falling, but I was too dizzy. The wood floor rushed up to meet me, and as I hit the ground the smoke burned my eyes --

By the time Abraham returned to Ravenwood, the ash had already made its way inside the house. The charred remnants of Gatlin's great houses wafted down from the open windows on the second floor like black snowflakes. As he ascended the staircase, Abraham's footsteps left impressions in the thin black layer already coating the floor. He secured the upstairs windows, without putting The Book of Moons down for a second. But he couldn't have put it down

even if he had wanted to. Ivy, the old cook from Greenbrier, was right; the Book was calling him, a whisper only he could hear. When he reached the study, Abraham rested the Book on the polished mahogany desk. He knew exactly which page to turn to, as if the Book was flipping the pages itself. As if it knew what he wanted. Even though he had never seen the Book before, Abraham knew the answer was in those pages, an answer that would guarantee Ravenwood's survival. The Book was offering him the one thing he wanted above all else. But it wanted something in return. Abraham stared down at the Latin script. He recognized it immediately. It was a Cast he had read about in other books. One he had always considered more of a myth. But he had been wrong, because it was staring back at him. Abraham heard Jonah's voice before he saw him. "Abraham, we have to get out of the house. The Federals are coming. They've burned everything, and they aren't planning to stop until they reach Savannah. We have to get into the Tunnels." Abraham's voice was resolute, and it sounded different somehow, even to him. "I'm not going anywhere, Jonah." "What are you talking about? We have to save what we can and get out of here." Jonah grabbed his brother's arm, noticing the open page beneath them. He stared at the script, unsure he could trust what he was seeing. "The Daemonis Pactum? The Demon's Trade?" Jonah stepped back. "Is this what I think it is? The Book of Moons?" "I'm surprised you recognize it. You never paid much attention during our studies." Jonah was used to Abraham's insults, but there was something different about his tone tonight. "Abraham, you can't." "Don't tell me what I can't do. You would watch this house burn to the ground before you thought to act. You have never been capable of doing what was required. You are weak, like Mother." Jonah flinched, as if someone had struck him. "Where did you get it?" "You don't need to worry about that." "Abraham, be sensible. The Demon's Trade is too powerful. It cannot be controlled. You are making a bargain, without knowing what you will have to sacrifice. We have other houses." Abraham pushed his brother aside. Though Abraham barely touched him, Jonah flew across the room. "Other houses? Ravenwood is the seat of our family's power in the Mortal world, and you think I intend to allow a few soldiers to burn it to the ground? I can use this to save Ravenwood." Abraham's voice rose. " Exscinde, neca, odium incende; mors portam patefacit. Destroy, kill, hate; death opens the gate." "Abraham, stop!" But it was too late. The words rolled off Abraham's tongue as if he had known them his entire life. Jonah looked around, panicked, waiting for the Cast to take effect. But he had no idea what his brother had asked for. He only knew that whatever it was, it would be done. That was the power of the Cast, but there was also a price. It was never the same. Jonah rushed toward his brother, and a small, perfectly round orb, the size of an egg, slipped from his pocket and rolled across the floor. Abraham picked up the sphere, glowing at his feet, and rolled it between his fingers. "What are you doing with an Arclight, Jonah? Is there a particular Incubus you're planning to imprison in this archaic device?" Jonah backed away as Abraham advanced, matching him step for step, but Abraham was too fast. In the blink of an eye, he pinned Jonah against the wall, his iron grip closing around his brother's throat. "No. Of course not. I --" Abraham tightened his hold. "What would an Incubus be doing with the only vessel capable of imprisoning his kind? Do you think I'm that stupid?" " I am only trying to protect you from yourself." In one fluid motion, Abraham lunged forward and plunged his teeth into his brother's shoulder. Then he did the unthinkable. He drank. The bargain was made. He would no longer be sustained by the memories and dreams of Mortals. From this day forward, he would crave blood. When he had his fill, Abraham dropped his brother's limp body and licked the ash from his hand, the taste of flesh still lingering in the black residue. "You should have been more concerned about protecting yourself." Abraham turned away from his brother's body. "Ethan." "Ethan!" I opened my eyes. I was lying on the floor of the archive. Marian was hovering over me in an un-Marian state of panic. "What happened?" "I don't know." I sat up, rubbing my head, wincing. There was a knot growing underneath my hair. "I must have hit the table on my way down." Macon's book was lying on the floor, open next to me. Marian looked at me with her uncanny ESP -- or not so uncanny, if you stopped to consider that she had followed me into visions herself only months ago. Within seconds, she had a cold pack in her hand and was holding it against my throbbing head. "You're having visions again, aren't you?" I nodded. My mind was swimming with images, but I couldn't focus on any one of them. "It's the second time. I had one the other night when I was holding Macon's journal." "What did you see?" "It was the night of the fires, like in the locket visions. Ethan Carter Wate was already dead. Ivy had The Book of Moons , and she gave it to Abraham Ravenwood. He was in both of the visions." His name sounded thick and fuzzy on my tongue. Abraham Ravenwood was the original boogeyman of Gatlin County. I gripped the edge of the table, steadying myself. Who wanted me to see the visions? More important, why? Marian paused, still holding the book. "Oh?" She looked at me carefully. "And someone else. His name began with a J. Judas? Joseph? Jonah. That was it. I think they were brothers. They were Incubuses." "Not just Incubuses." Marian snapped the book shut. "Abraham Ravenwood was a powerful Blood Incubus, the father of the Ravenwood Blood Incubus line." "What do you mean?" So, the story folks had been telling for years was true? I had cleared another layer of fog from the supernatural map of Gatlin. "Although all Incubuses are Dark by nature, not all of them choose to feed on blood. But once one does, the instinct appears to be inherited." I leaned against the table as the vision sharpened in my mind. "Abraham -- he's the reason Ravenwood Manor never burned, right? He didn't make a deal with the Devil. He made it with The Book of Moons ." "Abraham was dangerous, maybe more dangerous than any Caster. I can't imagine why you're seeing him now. Fortunately, he died young, before Macon was born." I tried to do the math. "That's young? How long do Incubuses usually live?" "A hundred and fifty to two hundred years." She replaced the book on her worktable. "I don't know what any of this has to do with you or Macon's journal, but I never should have given it to you. I interfered. We should leave this book locked up here." "Aunt Marian --" "Ethan! Don't pursue this, and don't tell anyone else about it, not even Amma. I can't imagine how she would react if you said the name Abraham Ravenwood in her presence." She put her arm around me and gave me a halfhearted squeeze. "Now, let's go finish up in the stacks before Olivia calls the police." She turned to the door and stuck her key in the lock. There was one more thing. I had to say it. "He could see me, Aunt Marian. Abraham looked right at me and said my name. That's never happened in the visions before." Marian stopped, staring at the door as if she could see right through it. It was more than a few seconds before she turned the key in the lock and swung the door open. "Olivia? Do you think Melvil Dewey could spare you for a cup of tea?" Our conversation was over. Marian was a Keeper and the Head Librarian of the Caster Library, the Lunae Libri. She could only tell me so much without violating her obligations. She couldn't take sides or change the course of events once they were set in motion. She couldn't be Macon for me, and she wasn't my mom. I was on my own.

6.14

Beneath the Paper

All of those?" There were three stacks of brown paper packages on the checkout desk. Marian marked the last one with the familiar GATLIN COUNTY LIBRARY stamp, always twice and always tied with the same white string. "No, take that pile, too." She pointed to a second pile, on the nearest trolley. "I thought nobody in this town reads." "Oh, they read. They just don't own up to what they read, which is why we make not only library-to-library deliveries but library-to-home ones as well. Circulating books only. Allowing two to three days for the processing of requests, of course."

Great. I was afraid to ask what was in these brown paper packages, and I was pretty sure I didn't want to know. I picked up a stack of books and groaned. "What are these, encyclopedias?" Liv pulled the receipt from the top bundle. "Yes. The Encyclopedia of Ammunition , actually." Marian waved us out the door. "Go with Ethan, Liv. You haven't had an opportunity to see our beautiful little town yet." "I can handle it." Liv sighed and pushed the trolley toward the door. "Come on, Hercules. I'll help you load up. Can't keep the ladies of Gatlin waiting on their ..." She consulted another receipt. "... Carolin-er Cake Doctor Cookbook , now can we?" "Carolina," I said, automatically. "That's what I said. Carolin-er." Two hours later, we had delivered most of the books and driven by both Jackson High and the Stop & Steal. As we circled the General's Green, I realized why Marian had been so eager to hire me at a library that was always empty and didn't need summer employees. She had planned for me to be Liv's teenage tour guide all along. It was my job to show her the lake and the Dar-ee Keen and fill in the gaps between what folks around here said and what they meant. My job was to be her friend. I wondered how Lena was going to feel about that. If she noticed. "I still don't understand why there's a statue of a general from a war the South didn't win, and one which was generally embarrassing for your country, in the middle of town." Of course she didn't. "Folks honor the fallen around here. There's a whole museum dedicated to them." I didn't mention the Fallen Soldiers was also the scene of my dad's Ridley-induced suicide attempt a few months ago. I looked over at Liv from behind the wheel of the Volvo. I couldn't remember the last time there had been any girl except Lena in the passenger's seat. "You're a terrible tour guide." "This is Gatlin. There isn't all that much to see." I glanced in the rearview mirror. "Or just not that much I want you to see." "What do you mean by that?" "A good tour guide knows what to show and what to hide." "I stand corrected. You're a terribly misguided tour guide." She pulled a rubber band out of her pocket. "So I'm more of a mis-guide?" It was a stupid joke, my trademark. "And I take issue with both your punning and your tour-guiding philosophy, generally speaking." She was working her blond hair into two braids, her cheeks pink from the heat. She wasn't used to the South Carolina humidity. "What do you want to see? You want me to take you to shoot cans behind the old cotton mill off Route 9? Flatten pennies on the train tracks? Follow the trail of flies into the eat-at-your-own-risk grease pit we call the Dar-ee Keen?" "Yes. All of the above, particularly the last bit. I'm starving." Liv dropped the last library receipt into one of two piles. "... seven, eight, nine. Which means I win, you lose, and get your hands off those chips. They belong to me now." She pulled my chili fries over to her side of the red plastic table. "You mean fries." "I mean business." Her side of the table was already covered with onion rings, a cheeseburger, ketchup, mayonnaise, and my sweet tea. I knew whose side was whose because she had made a line between us, laying french fries end to end, like the Great Wall of China. "'Good fences make good neighbors.' " I remembered the poem from English class. "Walt Whitman." She shook her head. "Robert Frost. Now keep your hands off my onion rings." I should've known that one. How many times had Lena quoted Frost's poems or twisted them into one of her own? We had stopped for lunch at the Dar-ee Keen, which was down the road from the last two deliveries we'd made -- Mrs. Ipswich (Guide to Colon Cleanliness) and Mr. Harlow (Classic Pinups of World War II ), which we had given to his wife because he wasn't home. For the first time, I understood the reason for the brown paper. "I can't believe it." I wadded up my napkin. "Who would have figured Gatlin was so romantic?" I had bet on church books. Liv had bet on romance novels. I lost, eight to nine. "Not only romantic, but romantic and righteous. It's a wonderful combination, so --" "Hypocritical?" "Not at all. I was going to say American. Did you notice we delivered It Takes a Bible and Divinely Delicious Delilah to the very same house?" "I thought that was a cookbook." "Not unless Delilah's cooking up something quite a bit hotter than these chili chips." She waved a fry in the air. "Fries." "Exactly." I turned bright red, thinking about how flustered Mrs. Lincoln had looked when we dropped those books off at her door. I didn't point out to Liv that Delilah's devotee was the mother of my best friend, and the most ruthlessly righteous woman in town. "So, you like the Dar-ee Keen?" I changed the subject. "I'm mad about it." Liv took a bite of her cheeseburger, big enough to put Link to shame. I'd already seen her wolf down more than the average varsity basketball player at lunch. She didn't seem to care what I thought about her one way or another, which was a relief. Especially since everything I did around Lena lately was wrong. "So what would we find in your brown paper package? Church books, romance novels, or both?" "I don't know." I had more secrets than I knew what to do with, but I wasn't about to share any of them. "Come on. Everyone has secrets." "Not everyone," I lied. "There's nothing at all beneath your paper?" "Nope. Just more paper, I guess." In a way, I wished it was true. "So you're rather like an onion?" "More like a regular old potato." She picked up a fry and examined it. "Ethan Wate is no regular old potato. You, sir, are a french fry." She popped it into her mouth, smiling. I laughed and conceded. "Fine. I'm a french fry. But no brown paper, nothing to tell." Liv stirred her sweet tea with her straw. "That confirms it. You are definitely on the waiting list for Divinely Delicious Delilah ." "You caught me." "I can't promise anything, but I will tell you that I know the librarian. Rather well, it turns out." "So you'll hook me up?" "I will hook you up, dude." Liv started laughing, and I did, too. She was easy to be around, like I'd known her forever. I was having fun, which, by the time we stopped laughing, turned into feeling guilty. Explain that to me. She returned to her fries. "I find all the secrecy sort of romantic, don't you?" I didn't know how to answer that, considering how deep the secrets went around here. "In my town, the pub is on the same street as the church, and the congregation moves directly from one to the other. Sometimes we even eat Sunday dinner there." I smiled. "Is it divinely delicious?" "Nearly. Maybe not quite so hot. But the drinks are not quite so cold." She pointed at her sweet tea with a fry. "Ice, my friend, is something you find on the ground more often than in your glass." "You have a problem with Gatlin County's famous sweet tea?" "Tea is meant to be hot, sir. From a kettle." I stole a fry and pointed it back at her sweet tea. "Well, ma'am, to a strict Southern Baptist, that is the Devil's drink." "You mean because it's cold?" "I mean because it's tea. No caffeine allowed." Liv looked shocked. "No tea? I'll never understand this country." I stole another fry. "You want to talk about blasphemy? You weren't there when Millie's Breakfast 'n' Biscuits over on Main started serving premade freezer biscuits. My great-aunts, the Sisters, pitched a fit that nearly took down the place. I mean, chairs were flying." "Are they nuns?" Liv stuck an onion ring inside her cheeseburger. "Who?" "The Sisters." Another onion ring. "No. They're actual sisters." "I see." She slapped the bun back down. "You don't, not really."

She picked up the burger and took a bite. "Not at all." We both started laughing again. I didn't hear Mr. Gentry walk up behind us. "Y'all get enough to eat?" he asked, wiping his hands with a rag. I nodded. "Yes, sir." "How's that girlfriend a yours?" He asked as if he was hoping I had come to my senses and dumped Lena by now. "Um, fine, sir." He nodded, disappointed, and walked back toward the counter. "Say hello to Miss Amma for me." "I take it he doesn't like your girlfriend?" She said it like a question, but I didn't know what to say. Was a girl still technically your girlfriend if she drove off with another guy? "I think Professor Ashcroft may have mentioned her." "Lena. My -- her name is Lena." I hoped I didn't look as uncomfortable as I felt. Liv didn't seem to notice. She took another sip of her tea. "I'll probably meet her at the library." "I don't know if she'll be coming by the library. Things have been weird lately." I don't know why I said it. I barely knew Liv. But it felt good to say it out loud, and my insides untwisted a little. "I'm sure you'll work it out. Back home, I fought with my boyfriend all the time." Her voice was light. She was trying to make me feel better. "How long have you guys been together?" Liv waved her hand in the air, the weird watch sliding down her wrist. "Oh, we broke up. He was a bit of a prat. I don't think he liked having a girlfriend who was smarter than he was." I wanted to get off the subject of girlfriends, and ex-girlfriends. "So what's that thing, anyway?" I nodded at the watch, or whatever it was. "This?" She held her wrist over the table so I could see the clunky black watch. It had three dials and a little silver needle that rested on a rectangle with zigzags all over it, sort of like one of those machines that track the strength of earthquakes. "It's a selenometer." I looked at her blankly. "Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon. Metron, or 'measure' in Greek." She smiled. "A little rusty on your Greek etymology?" "A little." "It measures the moon's gravitational pull." She turned one of the dials, thoughtfully. Numbers appeared under the pointer. "Why do you care about the moon's gravitational pull?" "I'm an amateur astronomer. I'm interested in the moon, mostly. It has a tremendous impact on the Earth. You know, the tides and everything. That's why I made this." I almost spit out my Coke. "You made it? Seriously?" "Don't be so impressed. It wasn't that difficult." Liv's cheeks flushed again. I was embarrassing her. She reached for another fry. "These chips really are brilliant." I tried to imagine Liv sitting in the English version of the Dar-ee Keen, measuring the gravitational pull of the moon over a mountain of fries. It was better than picturing Lena on the back of John Breed's Harley. "So let's hear about your Gatlin. The one where they call fries by the wrong name." I had never been any farther than Savannah. I couldn't imagine what life would be like in another country. "My Gatlin?" The pink spots on her cheeks faded. "Where you're from." "I'm from a town north of London, called Kings Langley." "What?" "In Hertfordshire." "Doesn't ring a bell." She took another bite of her burger. "Maybe this will help. It's where they invented Ovaltine. You know, the drink?" She sighed. "You stir it in milk, and it makes the milk into a chocolate malted?" My eyes widened. "You mean chocolate milk? Kind of like Nesquik?" "Exactly. It's amazing stuff, really. You should try it sometime." I laughed into my Coke, which spilled on my faded Atari T-shirt. Ovaltine girl meets Quik boy. I wanted to tell Link, but he would get the wrong idea. Even though it had only been a few hours, I had the feeling she was a friend. "What do you do when you're not drinking Ovaltine and making scientific devices, Olivia Durand of Kings Langley?" She crumpled the paper from her cheeseburger. "Let's see. Mostly I read books and go to school. I study at a place called Harrow. Not the boys' school." "Is it?" "What?" She scrunched up her nose. "Harrowing?" H. A. R. R. O. W. I. N. G. Nine across, as in, gettin' on in years and can't take much more a these harrowin' times, Ethan Wate. "You can't resist a terrible pun, can you?" Liv smiled. "And you didn't answer the question." "No. Not especially harrowing. Not for me." "Why not?" "Well, for starters, I'm a genius." She was matter-of-fact, as if she'd just said she was blond, or British. "So why did you come to Gatlin? We're not exactly a genius magnet." "Well, I'm part of the AGE, Academically Gifted Exchange, between Duke University and my school. Will you pass the mayo-nnaise?" "Mann-aise." I tried to say it slowly. "That's what I said." "Why would Duke bother to send you to Gatlin? So you could take classes at Summerville Community College?" "No, silly. So I could study with my thesis adviser, the renowned Dr. Marian Ashcroft, truly the only one of her kind." "What is your thesis about?" "Folklore and mythology, as it relates to community building after the American Civil War." "Around here most people still call it the War Between the States," I said. She laughed, delighted. I was glad someone thought it was funny. To me, it was just embarrassing. "Is it true people in the South sometimes dress up in old Civil War costumes and fight all the battles over again, for fun?" I stood up. It was one thing for me to say it, but I didn't want to hear it from Liv, too. "I think it's time to get going. We've got more books to deliver." Liv nodded, grabbing her fries. "We can't leave these. We should save them for Lucille." I didn't mention that Lucille was used to Amma feeding her fried chicken and plates of leftover casserole on her own china plate, as the Sisters had instructed. I couldn't see Lucille eating greasy fries. Lucille was partic-u-lar, as the Sisters would say. She liked Lena, though. As we headed for the door, a car caught my eye through the grease-coated windows. The Fastback was making a three-point turn at the end of the gravel parking lot. Lena made a point of not driving past us. Great. I stood and watched the car skid onto Dove Street. That night, I lay in my bed and stared up at the blue ceiling, my hands folded behind my head. A few months ago, this would've been when Lena and I went to bed in our separate rooms together -- reading, laughing, talking through our days. I had nearly forgotten how to fall asleep without her. I rolled over and checked my old, cracked cell. It hadn't really been working since Lena's birthday, but still, it would ring when someone called me. If someone had. Not like she'd use the phone. Right then, I was back to being the same seven-year-old who had dumped every puzzle in my room into one giant, miserable mess. When I was a kid, my mom sat on the floor and helped me turn the mess into a picture. But I wasn't a kid anymore, and my mom was gone. I turned the pieces over and over in my mind, but I couldn't seem to get them sorted out. The girl I was madly in love with was still the girl I was madly in love with. That hadn't changed. Only now the girl I was madly in love with was keeping secrets from me and barely speaking to me. Then there were the visions. Abraham Ravenwood, a Blood Incubus who had killed his own brother, knew my name and could see me. I had to figure out how the pieces fit together until I could see something -- some kind of pattern. I couldn't get the puzzle back into the box. It was too late for that. I wished someone could tell me where to put even one piece. Without thinking, I got up and pushed open my bedroom window. I leaned out and breathed in the darkness, when I heard Lucille's distinctive meow. Amma must have forgotten to let her back inside. I was about to call out to tell her I was coming, when I noticed them. Under my window, at the edge of the porch, Lucille Ball and Boo Radley sat side by side in the moonlight. Boo thumped his tail, and Lucille meowed in response. They sat like that at the top of the porch steps, thumping and meowing, as if they were carrying on as civilized a conversation as any two townsfolk on a summer night. I don't know what they were gossiping about, but it must have been big news. As I lay in bed listening to the quiet conversation of Macon's dog and the Sisters' cat, I drifted off before they did.

6.15

Southern Crusty

Don't you lay a finger on a single one a my pies until I ask you to, Ethan Wate." I backed away from Amma, hands in the air. "Just trying to help." She glared at me while she wrapped a sweet potato pie, a two-time winner, in a clean dish towel. The sour cream and raisin pie sat on the kitchen table next to the buttermilk pie, ready for the icebox. The fruit pies were still cooling on the racks, and a dusting of white flour coated every surface in the kitchen. "Only two days into summer and you're already under my feet? You'll wish you were over at the high school takin' summer classes if you drop one a my prizewinnin' pies. You want to help? Stop mopin' and go pull the car around." Tempers were running about as high as temperatures, and we didn't say much as we bumped our way out toward the highway in the Volvo. I wasn't talking, but I can't say anybody noticed. Today was the single biggest day of Amma's year. She had won first place in Baked and Fried Fruit Pies and second place in Cream Pies every year at the Gatlin County Fair for as long as I could remember. The only year she didn't get a ribbon was last year, when we didn't go because it was only two months after my mom's accident. Gatlin couldn't boast the biggest or the oldest fair in the state. The Hampton County Watermelon Festival had us beat by maybe two miles and twenty years, and the prestige of winning the Gatlin Peach Prince and Princess Promenade could hardly compare to the honor of placing in Hampton's Melon Miss and Master Pageant. But as we pulled into the dusty parking lot, Amma's poker face didn't fool my dad or me. Today was all about pageants and pies, and if you weren't balancing a pie wrapped as snugly as someone's firstborn, you were pushing a kid in curlers holding a baton toward the pavilion. Savannah's mom was Gatlin's Peach Pageant organizer, and Savannah was the defending Peach Princess. Mrs. Snow would be overseeing pageants all day. There was no such thing as too young for a crown in our county. The fair's Best Babies event, where rosy cheeks and diaper dispositions were compared like competing cobblers, drew more spectators than the Demolition Derby did. Last year, the Skipetts' baby was disqualified for cheating when her rosy cheeks came off on the judges' hands. The county fair had strict guidelines -- no formal wear until two years old, no makeup until six years old, and then only "age-appropriate makeup" until twelve. Back when my mom was around, she was always ready to take on Mrs. Snow, and the Peach Pageants were one of her favorite targets. I could still hear her saying, "Age-appropriate makeup? Who are you people? What makeup is age-appropriate for a seven-year-old?" But even my family never missed a county fair, except last year. Now here we were again, carrying pies through the crowds and into the fairgrounds, same as ever. "Don't jostle me, Mitchell. Ethan Wate, keep up. I'm not gonna let Martha Lincoln or any a those women beat me out a that ribbon on account a you two boys." In Amma's shorthand, those women were always the same women -- Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Asher, Mrs. Snow, and the rest of the DAR. By the time my hand was stamped, it looked like three or four counties had already beaten us there. Nobody missed the opening day at the fair, which meant a trip to the fairgrounds halfway between Gatlin and Peaksville. And a trip to the fairgrounds meant a disastrous amount of funnel cake, a day so hot and sticky you could pass out just from standing, and if you were lucky, some making out behind the Future Farmers of America poultry barns. My shot at anything but heat and funnel cake wasn't looking too good this year. My dad and I dutifully followed Amma to the judging tables under an enormous Southern Crusty banner. Pies had a different sponsor every year, and when it couldn't be Pillsbury or Sara Lee, you ended up with Southern Crusty. Pageants were crowd-pleasers, but Pies was the granddaddy of them all. The same families had been making the same recipes for generations, and every ribbon won was the pride of one great Southern house and the shame of another. Word had it that a few women from town had their sights set on keeping Amma from winning first place this year. Judging by the muttering I'd heard in the kitchen all week long, that would happen when hell froze over and those women were skating on it. By the time we had unloaded her precious cargo, Amma was already harassing the judges about table placement. "You can't put a vinegar after a cherry, and you can't put a rhubarb between my creams. It'll take the taste right out a them, unless that's what you boys are lookin' to do." "Here it comes," said my dad, under his breath. As the words came out of his mouth, Amma gave the judges the Look, and they squirmed in their folding chairs. My dad glanced over at the exit, and we slunk outside before Amma had a chance to put us to work terrorizing innocent volunteers and intimidating judges. The moment we hit the crowds, we instinctively turned in opposite directions. "You going to walk around the fair with that cat?" My dad looked down at Lucille sitting in the dirt next to me. "Guess so." He laughed. I still wasn't used to hearing it again. "Well, don't get into trouble." "Never do." My dad nodded at me, like he was the dad and I was the son. I nodded back, trying not to think about the last year, when I was the grown-up and he was out of his mind. He walked his way, I walked mine, and we both disappeared into the hot and sweaty masses. The fair was packed, and it took me a while to track down Link. But true to form, he was hanging out by the games, trying to flirt with any girl who would look at him, today being a prime opportunity to meet a few who weren't from Gatlin. He was standing in front of one of those scales you hit with a giant rubber mallet to prove how strong you are, the mallet resting on his shoulder. He was in full drummer mode, in his faded Social Distortion T-shirt, with his drumsticks stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, and his wallet chain hanging below the sticks. "Lemme show ya how it's done, ladies. Stand back. You don't wanna get hurt." The girls giggled as Link gave it his best shot. The little meter climbed up, measuring Link's strength and his chances of hooking up at the same time. It passed a REAL WUSS and WIMPY and headed toward the bell at the top, a real stud. But it didn't quite make it, stopping about halfway, at CHICKEN LITTLE. The girls rolled their eyes and headed for the Ring Toss. "This thing's rigged. Everyone knows that," Link shouted after them, dropping the mallet in the dirt. He was probably right, but it didn't matter. Everything in Gatlin was rigged. Why would the carnival games be any different? "Hey, you got any money?" Link pretended to dig around in his pockets, like he might actually have more than a dime. I handed him a five, shaking my head. "You need a job, man." "I've got a job. I'm a drummer." "That's not a job. It's not called a job unless you get paid." Link scanned the crowd, looking for girls or funnel cake. It was hard to tell which, since he responded equally to both. "We're tryin' to line up a gig." "Are the Holy Rollers playing at the fair?" "This lame scene? Nah." He kicked the ground. "They wouldn't book you?" "They said we sucked. But people thought Led Zeppelin sucked, too." As we walked through the fair, it was hard not to notice that the rides seemed to get a little smaller and the games a little shabbier every year. A pathetic-looking clown dragged a cluster of balloons past us. Link stopped, hitting me on the arm. "Check it out. Six o'clock. Third Degree Burns." As far as Link was concerned, a girl couldn't get hotter than that. He was pointing at a blond who was headed in our direction, smiling. It was Liv. "Link --" I tried to tell him, but he was on a mission. "As my mom would say, the Good Lord has good taste, hallelujah amen." "Ethan!" She waved at us. Link looked at me. "Are you kiddin' me? You've already got Lena. That's just wrong." "I don't have Liv, and these days I don't even know if I have Lena. Be cool." I smiled at Liv, until I noticed she was wearing a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Link saw it at the same time I did. "The perfect girl." "Hey, Liv. This is Link." I elbowed him, hoping he'd close his mouth. "Liv is Marian's summer research assistant. She works with me at the library." Liv held out her hand. Link stood there gawking. "Wow." The thing about Link was, he never embarrassed himself, just me. "She's an exchange student from England." "Holy wow." I looked at Liv and shrugged. "I told you." Link broke out his biggest smile for Liv. "Ethan didn't tell me he was workin' with a hot babe a cosmic proportions." Liv looked at me, pretending to be surprised. "You didn't? I find that rather tragic." She laughed and linked her arms through ours. "Come on, boys. Explain to me exactly how it is you make this strange cotton into candy." "I can't give away national secrets, ma'am." "I can." Link squeezed her arm with his. "Tell me everything." "Tunnel of Love or the Kissing Booth?" Link grinned even wider. Liv tilted her head. "Hmm. That's a tough one. I'm going to go with ... the Ferris Wheel." That's when I caught sight of the familiar black hair and the scent of lemons and rosemary in the breeze. Nothing else was familiar. Lena was a few yards away, standing behind the ticket booth in what had to be Ridley's clothes. Her black tank rode up on her stomach, and her black skirt was about five inches too short. There was a long streak of blue in her hair, twisting down from where it parted around her face, and down her back. But that wasn't what shocked me most. Lena, the girl who never put anything on her face but sunscreen, was covered in makeup. Some guys liked girls with crap all over their faces, but I wasn't one of them. Lena's black-rimmed eyes were especially disturbing. Surrounded by cutoff denim and dust and straw and sweat and red and white plastic checkered tablecloths, she looked even more out of place. Her old boots were the only thing I recognized. And her charm necklace, dangling like a lifeline back to the real Lena. She wasn't the kind of girl who wore stuff like that. At least, she didn't used to be. The lowlifes were checking her out, three guys deep. I had to resist the urge to punch all of them in the face. I dropped Liv's arm. "I'll meet you guys over there." Link couldn't believe his luck. "No problem, man." "We can wait," Liv offered. "Don't worry about it. I'll catch up with you." I hadn't expected to see Lena here, and I didn't know what to say without sounding even more whipped than Link already thought I was. As if there's something you can say to sound cool after your girlfriend takes off with another guy. "Ethan, I've been looking for you." Lena walked toward me, and she sounded like herself, her old self -- the Lena I remembered from a few months ago. The one I was desperately in love with, the one who loved me back. Even if she looked like Ridley. She stood on her tiptoes to push my hair out of my face, her fingers dragging slowly down my jawline. "That's funny, because the last time I saw you, you were ditching me." I tried to sound casual, but I just sounded angry. "I wasn't ditching you, exactly." She was defensive. "No, you were throwing trees at me and jumping on the back of a bike with some other guy." "I wasn't throwing trees." I raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?" She shrugged. "More like branches."

But I could tell I had gotten to her. She twisted the tiny paper-clip star I had given her, until I thought it was going to snap off of her necklace. "I'm sorry, Ethan. I don't know what's going on with me." Her voice was soft, honest. "Sometimes I feel like everything is closing in, and I can't take it. I wasn't ditching you at the lake. I was ditching me." "You sure about that?" She looked back up at me, a tear sliding down her cheek. She wiped it away, her fingers balled in frustration. She opened her fist and put her hand on my chest, resting it over my heart.

It's not you. I love you. "I love you." She said it out loud this time and the words hung in the air between us, so much more public than when we Kelted. My chest tightened when she said it, and my breath caught in my throat. I tried to think of something sarcastic to say, but I couldn't think about anything except how beautiful she was and how much I loved her, too. But I wasn't letting her off that easy this time. I broke the truce. "What's going on, L? If you love me so much, what's the deal with John Breed?" She looked away without saying a word.

Answer me. "It's not like that, Ethan. John's just a friend of Ridley's. There's nothing going on between us." "How long has nothing been going on? Since you took that picture of him in the graveyard?" "It wasn't a picture of him. It was his bike. I was meeting Ridley, and he happened to be there." I noticed she ignored the question. "Since when have you been hanging out with Ridley? Did you forget the part where she separated us so your mother could get you alone and try to convince you to go over to the Dark side? Or when Ridley almost killed my father?" Lena pulled her arm away from me, and I could feel her withdrawing again, moving back into that place I couldn't reach. "Ridley warned me you wouldn't understand. You're a Mortal. You don't know anything about me, not the real me. That's why I didn't tell you." I felt a sudden breeze as the storm clouds rolled in like a warning. "How do you know whether I would understand or not? You haven't told me anything. Maybe if you gave me the chance instead of sneaking around behind my back --" "What do you want me to tell you? That I have no idea what's going on with me? That something's changing, something I don't understand? That I feel like a freak, and Ridley's the only one who can help me figure it out?" I could hear everything she was saying, but she was right. I didn't understand. "Are you listening to yourself? You think Ridley's trying to help you, that you can trust her? She's a Dark Caster, L. Look at yourself! You think this is you? The things you're feeling, she's probably causing them." I waited for the downpour, but instead the clouds parted. Lena moved closer and put her hands on my chest again, staring up at me, pleading. "Ethan, she's changed. She doesn't want to be Dark. It ruined her life when she Turned. She lost everyone, including herself. Ridley says going Dark changes the way you feel about people. You can sense the feelings you had, the things you loved, but Rid says the feelings are distant. Almost like they belong to someone else." "But you said it wasn't something she could control." "I was wrong. Look at Uncle Macon. He knew how to control it, and Ridley's learning, too." "Ridley is not Macon." Heat lightning flashed across the sky. "You don't know anything." "That's right. I'm a stupid Mortal. I don't know anything about your supersecret Caster world and skanky Caster cousin, or Caster Boy and his Harley." Lena snapped. "Ridley and I were like sisters, and I can't turn my back on her. I told you, I need her right now. And she needs me." I didn't say anything. Lena was so frustrated, I was surprised the Ferris Wheel hadn't come loose and rolled away. I could see the lights from the Tilt-A-Whirl, spinning in the corner of my eye, churning and dizzying. It was the way I felt when I let myself get lost in Lena's eyes. Sometimes love feels that way, and you find your way to a truce when you don't really want to. Sometimes the truce finds you. She reached up and laced her fingers behind my neck, pulling me into her. I found her lips, and we were all over each other as if we were afraid we might never have the chance to touch again. This time, when her mouth tugged at my bottom lip, biting gently into my skin, there was no blood. Just urgency. I turned, pushing her against the rough wooden wall behind the ticket booth. Her breath was ragged, echoing in my ear even louder than my own. I raked my hands through her curls, guiding her mouth to mine. The pressure in my chest started to build, the shortness of breath, the sound of the air as I tried to fill my lungs. The fire. Lena felt it, too. She pushed away from me, and I bent over trying to catch my breath. "Are you okay?" I took a deep breath and stood up again. "Yeah, I'm all right. For a Mortal." She smiled a real smile and reached for my hand. I noticed she had drawn crazy-looking designs on her palm in Sharpie. The black curls and spirals swirled from her palm around her wrist and up the base of her arm. The pattern looked like the henna the fortune-teller wore, in the tent that smelled like bad incense at the other edge of the fairgrounds. "What is that?" I held her wrist, but she pulled it away. Remembering Ridley and her tattoo, I hoped it was Sharpie.

It is. "Maybe we should get you something to drink." She led me around the side of the booth, and I let her. I couldn't stay mad, not if there was a possibility the wall between us was finally coming down. When we kissed a minute ago, that's what I felt. It was the opposite of the kiss on the lake, a kiss that had taken my breath away for different reasons. I might never know what that kiss was. But I knew this kiss, and I knew it was all I had -- a chance. Which lasted two seconds. Because then I saw Liv, carrying two cotton candies in one hand and waving at me with the other, and I knew the wall was about to go back up, maybe for good. "Ethan, come on. I have your cotton candy. We're going to miss the Ferris Wheel!" Lena dropped my hand. I knew how it must have looked -- a tall blond, with long legs and two cotton candies and an expectant smile. I was doomed before Liv even got to the word we.

That's Liv, Marian's research assistant. She works with me at the library. Do you work at the Dar-ee Keen together, too? And the fair? Another flash of heat lightning tore across the sky.

It isn't like that, L. Liv handed me the cotton candy and smiled at Lena, holding out her hand.

A blond? Lena looked at me. Seriously? "Lena, right? I'm Liv."

Ah, the accent. That explains everything. "Hi, Liv." Lena pronounced her name like it was an inside joke between us. She didn't touch Liv's hand. If Liv noticed the slight, she ignored it, letting her hand drop. "Finally! I've been trying to get Ethan to introduce us properly, since it seems he and I are chained together for the summer."

Clearly. Lena wouldn't look at me, and Liv wouldn't stop looking at her. "Liv, this really isn't a good --" I couldn't stop it. They were two trains colliding in painfully slow motion. "Don't be silly," Lena interrupted, looking at Liv carefully, as if she was the Sybil in her family and she could read Liv's face. "So nice to meet you."

He's all yours. Take the whole town while you're at it. It took Liv about two seconds to realize she'd walked into something, but she tried to fill the silence all the same. "Ethan and I talk about you all the time. He says you play the viola." Lena stiffened.

Ethan and I. There was nothing mean about the way Liv said it, but the words themselves were enough. I knew what they meant to Lena. Ethan and the Mortal girl, the girl who was everything Lena couldn't be. "I've gotta go." Lena turned around before I could catch her arm.

Lena -Ridley was right. It was only a matter of time before another new girl came to town. I wondered what else Ridley had been telling her.

What are you talking about? We're just friends, L. We were just friends once, too. Lena took off, pushing her way through the sweaty crowd, causing a chain reaction of chaos as she went. Her ripple effect seemed endless. I couldn't see it perfectly, but somewhere between us a clown fumbled as the balloon character in his hands popped, a child cried as a snow cone dropped, and a woman screamed as a popcorn machine began to smoke and catch fire. Even in the slippery blur of heat and arms and noise, Lena affected everything in her wake, a pull as powerful as the moon to the tides, or the planets to the sun. I was caught in her orbit, even as she pulled away from mine. I took a step, and Liv put her hand on my arm. Her eyes narrowed as if she was analyzing the situation, or registering it for the first time. "I'm sorry, Ethan. I didn't mean to interrupt. I mean, if I was interrupting, you know. Something." I knew she wanted me to tell her what happened without having to ask. I didn't say anything, which I guess was my answer. The thing is, I didn't take another step. I let Lena go. Link walked toward us, fighting his way through the crowd, carrying three Cokes and his own cotton candy. "Man, the line at the drink booth is brutal." Link handed Liv a Coke. "What'd I miss? Was that Lena?" "She left," Liv said quickly, as if things were that simple. I wished they were. "Whatever. Forget the Ferris Wheel. We'd better get over to the main tent. They're gonna announce the winners a the pie-bakin' contest any minute, and Amma will tan your hide if you aren't there to watch her moment a glory." "Apple pie?" Liv brightened. "Yep. And you eat it wearin' Levi's, with a napkin tucked into your shirt up here. Drinkin' a Coke and drivin' a Chevy, while singing 'American Pie.' " I listened to Link ramble and Liv's easy laugh as they walked ahead of me. They didn't have nightmares. They weren't haunted. They weren't even worried. Link was right. We couldn't miss Amma's moment of glory. I sure wasn't winning any ribbons today. The truth was, I didn't need to bring the mallet down on the old, rigged carnival scale to know what it would say. Link might be CHICKEN LITTLE, but I felt lower than AREAL WUSS. I could pound away all I wanted, but the answer would always be the same. No matter what I did lately, I was caught somewhere between LOSER and ZERO, and it was starting to feel like Lena was holding the hammer. I finally understood why Link wrote all those songs about getting dumped.

6.15

Tunnel of Love

If it gets any hotter in here, people are goin' to start droppin' like flies. Flies are gonna start droppin' like flies." Link wiped his sweaty forehead with his sweaty hand, which sprayed liquid Link on those of us lucky to be standing next to him. "Thanks for that." Liv wiped her face with one hand and pulled her damp shirt away from her body with the other. She looked miserable. The Southern Crusty tent was packed, and the finalists were already standing on the makeshift wooden stage. I tried to see over the row of enormous women in front of us, but it was like standing in the Jackson cafeteria line on cookie day. "I can barely see the stage." Liv stood on her toes. "Is something supposed to be happening? Did we miss it?" "Hold on." Link tried to edge between the smaller of the two enormous women in front of us. "Yeah, we can't get any closer. I give up." "There's Amma." I pointed. "She's won first place almost every year." "Amma Treadeau," Liv said. "That's right. How did you know?" "Professor Ashcroft must have mentioned her." Carlton Eaton's voice blared over the loudspeaker as he fussed with the portable mic. He always announced the winners because the only thing he loved more than opening everyone's mail was the spotlight. "If y'all will bear with me, folks, we got some technical difficulties ... hold on now ... can someone call Red? How am I supposed to know how to fix a darn microphone? Shoot, it's hotter than Hades in here." He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. Carlton Eaton never managed to remember when the microphone was on. Amma stood proudly to his right, in her best dress, with the tiny violets all over it, holding her prizewinning sweet potato pie. Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Asher were next to her, holding their own creations. They were already dressed for the Mother-Daughter Peach Pageant that started right after Pies. They were equally frightening in their respective aqua and pink pageant mother gowns, which made them look like aging prom dates from the eighties. Thankfully, Mrs. Lincoln was not in the pageant, so she stood next to Mrs. Asher in one of her standard church dresses, holding her famous chess pie. It was still hard to look at Link's mom without remembering the insanity of Lena's last birthday. You don't see your girlfriend's mother stepping out of your best friend's mom's body too many nights of the year. When I saw Mrs. Lincoln now, that's what I thought of -- the moment Sarafine emerged like a snake shedding its skin. I shuddered. Link elbowed me. "Dude, look at Savannah. She's got the crown on and everything. She sure knows how to milk it." Savannah, Emily, and Eden were sitting in the front row with the rest of the Peach Pageant contestants, sweating away in their tackiest pageant evening wear. Savannah was in yards of glittery Gatlin peach, with her rhinestone Peach Princess crown balanced perfectly on her head, even though the train of her dress kept snagging on the bottom of her cheap metal folding chair. Little Miss, the local dress shop, probably had to special-order it for her all the way from Orlando. Liv edged her way closer to me, eyeing the cultural phenomenon that was Savannah Snow. "Is she the queen of Southern Crusty, then?" Liv's eyes twinkled, and I tried to imagine how strange this all must look to an outsider. I almost smiled. "Just about." "I didn't realize baking was so important to Americans. Anthropologically speaking." "I don't know about other places, but in the South, women take their baking seriously. And this is the biggest pie-baking contest in Gatlin County." "Ethan, over here!" Aunt Mercy was waving her handkerchief in one hand and carrying her infamous coconut pie in the other. Thelma was walking behind her, shoving people aside with Aunt Mercy's wheelchair. Every year Aunt Mercy entered the contest, and every year she got an honorable mention for her coconut pie, even though she'd forgotten how to make it about twenty years ago, and none of the judges were brave enough to taste it. Aunt Grace and Aunt Prue were arm in arm, dragging Aunt Prue's Yorkshire terrier, Harlon James, behind them. "Well, fancy seein' you here, Ethan. Did you come ta see Mercy win her ribbon?" "Of course he did, Grace. What else would he be doin' in a tent fulla old ladies?" I wanted to introduce Liv, but the Sisters didn't give me a chance. They kept talking over one another. I should've known Aunt Prue would take care of that for me. "Who's this, Ethan? Your new girlfriend?" Aunt Mercy adjusted her spectacles. "What happened ta the other one? The Duchannes girl, with the dark hair?" Aunt Prue looked at her suspiciously. "Well, Mercy, that's jus' none a our concern. You shouldn't be askin' anything about it. She mighta up and left him." "Why would she do that? Ethan, you didn't ask that girl ta get nekkid, did ya?" Aunt Prue gasped. "Mercy Lynne! If the Good Lord doesn't strike us all down on account a that talk ..." Liv looked dizzy. She obviously wasn't used to following the banter of three hundred-year-old women with thick Upcountry accents and fractured grammar. "Nobody tried -- nobody left anyone. Everything is fine between Lena and me," I lied. Even though they'd find out the truth the next time they went to church, if their hearing aids were turned up high enough to hear the gossip. "This is Liv, Marian's summer research assistant. We work together at the library. Liv, this is Aunt Grace, Aunt Mercy, and Aunt Prudence, my great-great-aunts." "Don't you be addin' any extra greats in there." Aunt Prue pulled herself up a little straighter. "That's her name. Lena! It was on the tip a my tongue." Aunt Mercy smiled at Liv. Liv smiled back. "Of course. It's a pleasure to meet you all." Carlton Eaton tapped on the mic just in time. "All right, y'all, I think we can get started." "Girls, we need ta get up ta the front. They'll be callin' my name in no time." Aunt Mercy was already working her way through the aisles, rolling forward like an army tank. "We'll see you in two shakes of a rabbit's tail, Sweet Meat." People filed into the tent from all three entrances, and Lacy Beecham and Elsie Wilks, the winners of Casseroles and Barbeque, took their places next to the stage, holding their blue ribbons. Barbeque was a big category, even bigger than Chili, so Mrs. Wilks was about as puffed up as I'd ever seen her. I watched Amma's face, so proud, not glancing at one of those women even once. Then I watched it darken, and she looked off toward one side of the tent. Link ribbed me again. "Hey, lookit. I mean, you know, the Look." We followed Amma's stinkeye to the far corner of the tent. When I saw who she was looking at, I tensed. Lena was slouching against one of the tent poles, eyes on the stage. I knew she couldn't have cared less about a pie-baking contest, unless she was here to root for Amma. And from the looks of it, Amma didn't think that's why Lena was here. Amma shook her head at Lena, ever so slightly. Lena looked away. Maybe she was looking for me, though I was probably the last person she wanted to see right now. So what was she doing here? Link grabbed my arm. "It's -- she's --" Lena glanced across to the pole opposite her. Ridley leaned against the pole in a pink miniskirt, unwrapping a lollipop. Her eyes were fixed on the stage, like she actually cared about who was going to win. I knew she didn't, because the only thing she cared about was causing trouble. Since there were about two hundred people too many in the tent, this seemed about as good a place for trouble as any. Carlton Eaton's voice echoed over the crowd. "Testin', testin'. Can y'all hear me? All right, then, on to Cream Pies. We have ourselves a close one this year, folks. Had myself the pleasure a tastin' a few a these pies, and I'm here to tell you every single one a 'em's a winner in my O-pinion. But I reckon we can only have one first-place winner here tonight, so let's see who it's gonna be." Carlton fumbled with the first envelope, ripping the paper loudly. "Here it is, folks, our third-place winner is ... Tricia Asher's Creamsicle Pie." Mrs. Asher scowled for a millisecond, then flashed her phony smile. I kept my eyes locked on Ridley. She had to be up to something. Ridley didn't give a crap about pie, or anything that happened in Gatlin. Ridley turned and nodded toward the back of the tent. I looked behind me. Caster Boy was watching with a smile. He was standing by the rear entrance, his eyes on the finalists. Ridley turned her attention back to the stage and slowly, deliberately, began sucking on her lollipop. Never a good sign.

Lena! Lena didn't even blink. Her hair began to twist in the stagnant air, blowing in what I knew was the Casting Breeze. I don't know if it was the heat or the close quarters or the grim look on Amma's face, but I was starting to worry. What were Ridley and John up to, and why was Lena Casting here? Whatever they were trying to do, Lena must be trying to counteract it. Then I figured it out. Amma wasn't the only one dealing out the Look like a bad spread of cards. Ridley and John were staring down Amma, too. Was Ridley stupid enough to mess with Amma? Was anyone? Ridley held up the lollipop as if to answer. "Uh-oh." Link stared. "We should probably get outta here." "Why don't you take Liv to the Ferris Wheel?" I said, trying to catch Link's eye. "I think things are going to be pretty boring for a while." "Now we've reached the most excitin' part a the judgin'," said Carlton Eaton, as if on cue. "All right, y'all, this is it. Let's see which one a these here ladies is gonna be takin' home a second-place ribbon and five hundred dollars' worth a brand new bakeware, or a first-place ribbon and seven hundred fifty dollars, compliments a Southern Crusty. 'Cause if it ain't Southern Crusty, it ain't the South, and it ain't Crusty --" Carlton Eaton never finished, because before he could say the words, something else came out -Of the pies. The pie tins began to move, and it took people a few seconds to realize what was happening, before they started screaming. Grubs and maggots and palmetto bugs, Carolina cockroaches, started crawling out of the pies. It was as if all the hate and lies and hypocrisy of the whole town -- of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Asher and Mrs. Snow, the principal of Jackson High, and the DAR and the PTA and every church auxiliary, all rolled into one -- had been baked into those pies, and now it was coming to life. Bugs were pouring out of every pie onstage, more bugs than the pie tins could possibly hold. Every pie except Amma's. She shook her head, her eyes narrowing into slits like some kind of challenge. Hordes of cream-covered grubs and roaches hit the floor around the contestants' feet. But the trail of scurrying insects diverged in a neatly forking path around Amma. Mrs. Snow reacted first. She hurled her pie, sticky fruit-covered bugs rocketing into the air and landing all over the front row. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Asher followed suit, maggots raining down on the Peach Pageant contestants' satin dresses. Savannah started screaming, not fake screaming but real, bloodcurdling screams. Everywhere you looked, there were pie-covered worms and people trying not to puke at the sight of them. Some were more successful than others. I saw Principal Harper doubled over a trash can by the exit, getting rid of a whole day's worth of funnel cake. If Ridley was looking to stir up trouble, she had succeeded. Liv looked ill. Link tried to push forward into the crowd, most likely to rescue his mom. He had been doing that a lot lately, and considering how unrescuable his mother was, I had to give him credit. Liv grabbed my arm as the crowd surged forward toward the exits. "Liv, get out of here. Go out that way. Everyone's heading for the sides." I pointed to the back exit of the tent. John Breed was still standing there, smiling at his handiwork, his green eyes fixed on the stage. Green eyes or not, he wasn't one of the good guys. Link was on the stage brushing worms and bugs off his mother, who was completely hysterical. I worked my way closer to the front. "Somebody help me!" Mrs. Snow looked like someone in a horror movie, terrified and screaming, her dress alive with squirming bugs. Even I didn't hate her enough to wish this on her. I caught a glimpse of Ridley, sucking away on her lollipop, bringing bugs to life with every lick. I didn't know she could pull off something this big by herself, but then again she had Caster Boy to help her.

Lena, what's happening? Amma was still standing on the stage, looking like she could bring down the whole tent with a single look. Bugs and worms were crawling over each other at her feet, but not one was brave enough to touch Amma. Even the bugs knew better. She was staring down at Lena, her eyes narrow and her jaw tight, as she had been from the moment the first grub crawled its way out of Mrs. Lincoln's chess pie. "You fixin' to make me do this now?" Lena stood at the edge of the tent, her hair still twisting in the Casting Breeze, the corners of her mouth upturned into the smallest shadow of a smile. I recognized it for what it was. Satisfaction.

Now everyone knows what's really in their pies.

Lena hadn't been trying to stop them. She was part of it.

Lena! Stop! But there was no stopping now. This was payback for the Guardian Angels and the Disciplinary Committee meeting, for every token casserole left at the gates of Ravenwood and every pitying look, for every insincere sentiment offered by the folks of Gatlin. Lena was handing it right back as if she'd saved every bit, storing it all up until it exploded in their faces. I guess this was her way of saying good-bye. Amma spoke to Lena as if they were the only people in the tent. "Enough, child. You can't get what you want from these folks. Sorry from a sorry town is nothin' but a whole lot more a the same. A pie tin fulla nothin'." Aunt Prue's voice pierced the din. "Good Lord, help! Grace is havin' a heart attack!" Aunt Grace was lying on the ground, unconscious. Grayson Petty was kneeling over her, taking her pulse while Aunt Prue and Aunt Mercy batted palmetto bugs away from their sister. "I said enough!" Amma roared from the stage, and as I ran for Aunt Grace, I could've sworn the tent was going to come down on top of us. As I bent down to help, I saw Amma pull something out of her pocketbook and hold it high above her head. The One-Eyed Menace, our old wooden spoon, in its full glory. Amma brought it down on the table in front of her with a crack. "Oww!" Across the room, Ridley winced and the lollipop dropped right out of her hand, rolling across the dirt as if Amma had smashed it with the Menace itself. In that second, everything stopped. I looked over to Lena, but she was gone. The spell, or whatever it was, was broken. The palmetto bugs scampered out of the tent, leaving only the grubs and worms behind. And me, leaning over Aunt Grace to make sure she was breathing.

Lena, what have you done? Link followed me out of the tent, confused as usual. "I don't get it. Why would Lena help Ridley and Caster Boy pull a stunt like that? Someone coulda really gotten hurt." I scanned the rides closest to us to see if there was any sign of Lena or Ridley. But I didn't see them, just the 4-H volunteers fanning old women and handing out plastic cups of water to the victims of the pie-baking contest from hell. "You mean, like my Aunt Grace?" Link yanked on his shorts to make sure they were grub-free. "I thought she was a goner. Lucky she just fainted. Probably the heat." "Yeah. Lucky." But I didn't feel lucky. I was too angry. I had to find Lena, even if she didn't want to be found. She was going to have to tell me why she would terrorize everyone in that tent to get even with -- who? A few aging beauty queens? Link's mom, who was just aging? It was something Ridley would do, not Lena. It was getting dark, and Link scanned the crowd through the flashing lights and hysterical church ladies. "Where'd Liv go? Wasn't she with you?" "I don't know. I told her to go out the back when the bugfest started." Link cringed at the word bug. "Should we look for her?" There was a group of people in line at the Fun House, so I headed that way. "I get the impression Liv knows how to take care of herself. I think this is something we have to do on our own." "Right on." We turned the corner a few yards from the entrance to the Tunnel of Love. Ridley, Lena, and John were standing in front of the dingy plastic cars painted to look like gondolas. Lena was standing in the middle, a leather jacket slung over her shoulders. Only she didn't have a leather jacket. John did. I called her name, without even thinking. "Lena!"

Leave me alone, Ethan. No. What were you thinking? I wasn't thinking. I was finally doing something. Yeah. Something stupid. Don't tell me you're on their side now. I was walking fast. Link struggled to keep up with me. "You're gonna start a fight, aren't you? Man, I hope Caster Boy doesn't set us on fire or turn us into statues or somethin'." Link was usually up for a fight. Even though he was skinny, he was almost as tall as me, and twice as crazy. But the prospect of fighting a Supernatural didn't have the same appeal. We'd been burned on that one before. I wanted to let him off the hook. "I've got this. Go find Liv." "No way, dude. I've got your back." When we got to the gondolas, John stepped forward protectively, in front of the girls, as if we were the ones they needed to be protected from.

Ethan, get out of here. I could hear the fear in her voice, but this time I was the one who didn't answer. "Hey, Boyfriend, how's it goin'?" Ridley smiled and unwrapped a blue lollipop. "Screw you, Ridley." She noticed Link behind me, and her smile changed. "Hiya, Hot Rod. You wanna take a ride through the Tunnel of Love?" Ridley tried to sound playful, but she sounded nervous instead. Link grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward him, almost like he really was her boyfriend. "What did you think you were doin' back there? You coulda gotten someone killed. Ethan's four-hundred-year-old aunt almost had a heart attack." Ridley snatched her arm back. "It was only a few bugs. Don't be so melodramatic. I think I liked you better when you were a little more compliant." "Yeah, I bet." Lena stepped out from behind John. "What happened? Is your aunt okay?" She seemed like my Lena again, kind and concerned, but I didn't trust her anymore. A few minutes ago, she was taking down the women she hated and everyone else in the tent with them, and now she was the girl I kissed behind the ticket booth. It didn't add up. "What were you doing back there? How could you help them?" I didn't realize how mad I was until I heard myself yelling. But John did. He slammed his palm against my chest, and I stumbled back. "Ethan!" Lena was scared, I could tell that much.

Stop! You don't know what you're doing. Like you said. At least I'm finally doing something. Do something else. Get out of here! "You can't talk to her like that. Why don't you leave before you get hurt." What had I missed? Lena had walked away from me barely an hour ago, and now John Breed was defending her like she was already his girlfriend? "Yeah? You should be careful who you push around, Caster Boy." "Caster Boy?" He took a step closer to me, curling his hands into fists. Big fists. "Don't call me that." "What should I call you? Dirtbag?" I wanted him to hit me. He lunged at me, but I threw the first punch. I'm stupid that way. I released all the frustration and anger I'd been holding inside the second my soft human fist made contact with his steel supernatural jaw. It was like hitting cement. John blinked, his green eyes turning as black as coal. He hadn't felt a thing. "I'm not a Caster." I had been in my share of fights, but none of them could have prepared me for what it felt like to be hit by John Breed. I remembered watching Macon and his brother Hunting fighting, their incredible strength and speed. John barely moved, and my back hit the ground. I thought I was going to pass out. "Ethan! John, stop!" Lena was screaming, black makeup running down her face. I heard John slam Link into the dirt. To his credit, Link got up faster than I did. Only he was back down again faster, too. I picked myself up off the ground. I wasn't that banged up, but I was going to have a hard time hiding the bruises from Amma. "That's enough, John." Ridley tried to sound cool, but her voice had an edge and she looked scared -- as scared as Ridley could look. She grabbed John's arm. "Let's go. We've got somewhere to be." Link looked her right in the eye, which took some effort, considering he was lying in the dirt. "Don't do me any favors, Rid. I can take care of myself." "I can see that. You're a real Golden Glove." Link winced at the dig, or maybe it was the pain. Either way, he wasn't used to being the one on the ground in a fight. He pushed himself to his feet and held up his fists, ready to go again. "They're the fists a fury, Baby, and they're just gettin' started." Ridley stepped between John and Link. "No. They're finished." Link dropped his hands, kicking the dust. "Yeah, well, I could take him if he wasn't a -- what the hell are you, man?" I didn't give John a chance to answer, because I was pretty sure I already knew. "He's some kind of Incubus." I looked at Lena. She was still crying, her arms hugging her waist, but I didn't try to talk to her. I wasn't even sure who she was anymore. "You think I'm an Incubus? A Demon Soldier?" John laughed. Ridley rolled her eyes. "Don't be such a show-off. No one calls Incubuses Demon Soldiers anymore." John cracked his knuckles. "I'm old school." Link looked confused. "I thought all you vampire dudes had to stay inside durin' the day." "And I thought all you hillbillies drove Trans Ams with Confederate flags painted on the hoods." John laughed, but it wasn't funny. Ridley stayed between them. "What does it matter to you, Shrinky Dink? John's not really a rules kinda guy. He's sort of ... unique. I like to think of him as the best of both worlds." I had no idea what Ridley was talking about. But whatever John Breed was, she wasn't saying. "Yeah? I like to think about him as crawlin' back to his own world and stayin' outta ours." Link talked tough, but when John looked at him, all the color drained out of Link's face. Ridley turned to John. "Let's go." They turned back to the Tunnel of Love, the cars still making the loop under the old wooden arch painted to look like some bridge in Venice. Lena hesitated. "Lena, don't go with them." She stood there for a second, like she was thinking about running back into my arms. But something was stopping her. John whispered to her, and she climbed into the plastic gondola. I looked at the only girl I'd ever loved. Black hair and golden eyes, instead of green. I couldn't pretend the gold didn't mean anything, not anymore. I watched the car disappear, leaving Link and me behind. As banged up and bruised as the day we had taken on Emory and his brother on the playground in fifth grade.

"Come on. Let's get outta here." Link was already walking away. It was dark now, and the lights from the Ferris Wheel flashed as it turned. "Why'd you think he was an Incubus?" Link was taking comfort in the fact he had gotten his ass kicked by a Demon, not some regular guy. "His eyes went black, and it felt like I was hit by a two-by-four." "Yeah, but he was walkin' around durin' the day. And he's got those green eyes, like Lena's ..." He stopped, but I knew what he was about to say. "Used to be? I know. It doesn't make sense." Nothing about tonight did. I couldn't shake the way Lena had looked at me. For a second, I was sure she wasn't going to follow them. I was thinking about Lena, but Link was still talking about John. "And what was all that crap about the best a both worlds? What worlds? Creep and creepier?" "I don't know. I was sure he was an Incubus." Link rotated his shoulder, assessing the damage. "Whatever he is, that dude's got some serious superpowers. I wonder what else he can do." We turned the corner, near the exit of the Tunnel of Love. I stopped walking. The best of both worlds. What if John could do a lot more than rip like an Incubus and beat the two of us to a pulp? He had green eyes. What if he was some kind of Caster, with his own version of Ridley's Power of Persuasion? I didn't think Ridley could influence Lena by herself, but what if John was helping her? It would explain why Lena was acting so crazy -- why she'd looked like she wanted to come with me, until John whispered in her ear. How long had he been whispering to her? Link hit my arm with the back of his hand. "Hey. You know what's weird?" "What?" "They haven't come out." "What do you mean?" He pointed to the exit of the Tunnel of Love. "They didn't get off the ride." Link was right. There was no way they could have come out before we turned the corner. We watched as the gondolas kept coming out empty. "Then where are they?" Link shook his head, all tapped out of insight for now. "I don't know. Maybe the three of them are doin' somethin' kinky in there." We both winced. "Let's check it out. There's no one around." Link was already halfway to the exit. He was right. The cars kept coming out empty. Link hopped over the gate around the ride and ducked into the tunnel. Inside, there was a little space on either side of the track, but it was tricky to walk by the moving cars without getting hit. One of the cars caught Link in the shin. "There's no one in here. Where could they have gone?" "They couldn't have disappeared." I remembered the way John Breed ripped out of Macon's funeral. Maybe he could, but Ridley and Lena couldn't Travel. Link ran his hands along the walls. "You think there's some kinda secret Caster door in here, or somethin'?" The only Caster doors I knew about led to the Tunnels, the underground labyrinth of passageways that slept quietly under Gatlin and the rest of the Mortal world. It was a world within a world, so different from ours that it altered both time and distance. But, as far as I knew, all the entrances to the Tunnels were inside buildings -- Ravenwood, the Lunae Libri, the crypt at Greenbrier. A few sheets of painted plywood didn't qualify as a building, and there was nothing under the Tunnel of Love except dirt. "A door leading where? This thing is sitting in the middle of the fair. They just set it up a couple of days ago." Link inched his way back out of the tunnel. "Where else could they have gone?" If John and Ridley were using their powers to control Lena, I had to find out. It wouldn't explain away the last few months or her golden eyes, but maybe it would explain what she was doing with John. "I've gotta get down there." Link had already pulled the keys out of his back pocket. "How'd I know you were gonna say that?" He followed me to the Beater, the gravel crunching under his sneakers as he jogged to keep up. He yanked the rusty door open and slid behind the wheel. "Where are we goin'? Or am I better off --" He was still talking when I heard it, the tiny words tugging at the bottom of my heart.

Good-bye, Ethan. They were gone, the voice and the girl. Like a soap bubble, or cotton candy, or the last silvery sliver of a dream.

6.15

Unmistakable

The Beater skidded to a stop in front of the Historical Society, the front tires halfway up the curb, the engine dying out on the empty street. "Can you take it down a notch? Someone's gonna hear us." Not that Link ever drove any differently. Still, we were parked only a few feet from the building that served as the DAR headquarters. I noticed the roof had finally been rebuilt -- it had blown off in Hurricane Lena, a few days before her birthday. Though Jackson High had been hit by the same storm, I guess those repairs could wait. We had our priorities around here. Almost everyone in South Carolina was related to a Confederate, so joining the Daughters of the Confederacy was easy. But to join the DAR, you needed a bloodline going back to someone who fought in the war for American independence. The problem was the proof. Unless you were an actual signer of the Declaration of Independence, you had to establish a paper trail a mile long. Even then you had to be invited, which required sucking up to Link's mom and signing whatever petition she happened to be passing around. Maybe it was a bigger deal down here than up North, like we needed to prove we had all fought for the same side in a war once. The Mortal part of our town was just as confusing as the Caster one. Tonight the building looked empty. "It's not like there's anyone around to hear us. Until the Demolition Derby ends, everyone we know is at the fairgrounds." Link was right. Gatlin may as well have been a ghost town. Most folks were still at the fair, or at home on the phone reporting the details of a certain Southern Crusty bake-off that would go down in history for decades to come. I was pretty sure Mrs. Lincoln wouldn't have let any of the DAR members miss watching her try to beat Amma out of first place in Pies. Although, right about now, I bet Link's mom was wishing she had stuck to pickled okra this year. "Not everyone." I was out of ideas and explanations, but I knew where we could get some of both. "You sure this is a good idea? What if Marian's not here?" Link was jumpy. The sight of Ridley hanging out with some kind of mutant Incubus wasn't bringing out the best in him. Not that he had anything to worry about. It was pretty clear who John Breed was after, and it wasn't Ridley. I checked my cell. It was almost eleven. "It's a bank holiday in Gatlin. You know what that means. Marian should be in the Lunae Libri by now." That's how it worked around here. Marian was the Gatlin County Head Librarian from nine in the morning until six at night every weekday. But on bank holidays, she was the Head Caster Librarian from nine at night until six in the morning. The Gatlin Library was closed, which meant the Caster Library was open. And the Lunae Libri had a door leading into the Tunnels. I slammed the door of the Beater as Link pulled a Maglite out of his glove box. "I know, I know. The Gatlin Library's closed and the Caster Library's open all night long, on account a most a Marian's clients don't come around durin' the day." Link waved the flashlight across the building in front of us. A brass placard read DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. "Still, if my mom or Mrs. Asher or Mrs. Snow found out what was in the basement a their buildin' ..." He was holding the heavy metal flashlight like he was brandishing a weapon. "You planning to take someone out with that thing?" Link shrugged. "Never know what we're gonna find down there." I knew what he was thinking. Neither one of us had been back to the Lunae Libri since Lena's birthday. Our last visit had been more about danger than dictionaries. Danger and death. We did something wrong that night, and some of it had happened right here. If I had gotten to Ravenwood earlier, if I had found The Book of Moons , if I could have helped Lena fight Sarafine -- if we had done one thing differently, would Macon be alive right now? We made our way around to the back of the old red brick building, in the moonlight. Link shined his flashlight on the grating near the ground, and I crouched down next to it. "Ready, man?" The light was shaking in his hand. "Whenever you are." I reached through the familiar grating built into the back of the building. My hand disappeared, as always, into the illusionary entrance of the Lunae Libri. Nothing much in Gatlin was what it first appeared to be -- at least not where Casters were concerned. "I'm surprised that spell still works." Link watched as I pulled my hand back out of the grate, as good as new. "Lena told me it's not a hard one. Some kind of hiding spell Larkin Cast." "Ever wonder if it could be a trap?" The flashlight was shaking so badly, the light was barely shining on the grating. "Only one way to find out." I shut my eyes and stepped through. One minute I was standing in the overgrown bushes behind the DAR, and the next I was inside the stone stairwell leading down into the heart of the Lunae Libri. I shivered when I crossed the Charmed threshold into the library, but not because I felt anything supernatural. The shiver, the wrongness, came from not feeling anything different at all. Air was air on either side of the grate, even if it was pitch-black. I didn't feel magical right now, not anywhere in Gatlin or beneath it. I felt bruised and angry but hopeful. I had been convinced Lena had feelings for John. But if there was a possibility I was wrong -- that John and Ridley were influencing her -- it was worth being on the wrong side of the grate again. Link stumbled through the doorway after me and dropped his flashlight. It clattered down the stairwell in front of us, and we stood in the dark, until the torches lining the steep passageway lit themselves one by one. "Sorry. That thing always throws me off." "Link, if you don't want to do this --" I couldn't see his face in the shadows. It took a second before I heard his voice in the dark. "Of course I don't wanna do this, but I gotta do it. I mean, I'm not sayin' Rid's the love a my life. She's not. That would be crazy. But what if Lena was tellin' the truth, and Rid wants to change? What if Vampire Boy is doin' somethin' to her, too?" I doubted Ridley was under anyone's influence except her own. But I didn't say an